


Trinity

by Cephy



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Arranged Marriage, Battle, Best Friends, Friendship/Love, Multi, Soul Bond, Threesome, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-10-07
Updated: 2014-03-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 22:09:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 28,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/129653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephy/pseuds/Cephy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(AU) The Kingdom has come under attack by an unknown enemy, and the lives of three young people are swept up by the struggle: Sora, King's Rider and unofficial champion; Kairi, daughter of one of the border holdings; and Riku, a hunter from the wilds beyond the Kingdom's protection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

As expected, Riku found Kairi in the stable, brushing down her horse with not a groomsman in sight. The horse, a sturdy grey mare, leaned into the strokes with its neck arched in pleasure, and Kairi herself had a tiny, contented smile on her face. It was a familiar sight, and one that made something sharp twist in Riku's stomach as he slipped in the side door and leaned against the wall there, watching her.

If he'd hoped to arrive unnoticed, he would have been disappointed when she spoke without even bothering to look over her shoulder. "About time you showed up," she said warmly. "Don't tell me you've been out hunting all this time."

"Afraid so."

Her hand stilled for just a moment, hesitating before the next stroke. "Anything we should worry about?"

He shrugged, deliberately casual. "The usual things with sharp teeth. No big deal, just time-consuming."

"There've been more of those lately," she said, equally casual.

He could still hear the worry beneath her light tone, though, and he frowned at the floor as he quickly debated how much to say. He didn't want to worry her unneccesarily. But she wouldn't thank him for keeping secrets, either, and she was bound to find out eventually. He sighed. "Yeah. We've been keeping on top of it so far, but there's sign of more troubles further out. Larger creatures, more of them, much more agressive."

"Oh, that's not good." Kairi huffed a frustrated sigh of her own. "Of all the times to have to leave," she started, then cut off sharply.

A heavy silence fell between them. Riku caught himself chewing the corner of his lip and made himself stop, frowning. He'd been mostly trying to avoid thinking or speaking of that-- of her _leaving_ \-- but the day was at an end, and he wasn't about to let her go without saying goodbye. So he braced himself and took a deep breath. "You're heading out tomorrow morning, then?"

Kairi's hands stuttered again as she nodded, still not looking at him. "We leave at first light. If we ride hard, and if the weather cooperates, we'll make the capital in just over a week."

Riku, glancing at the sky beyond the door, found himself wishing for rain before sourly acknowledging that it wouldn't do them any good.

Kairi briskly packed away the tools and patted the mare on the nose in farewell. She lifted her chin and turned to face Riku at last, her eyes unflinching as she met his own. "Will I see you tomorrow, before we leave?"

Riku let his own gaze slide away. "Do you want me to be there?" he asked.

Kairi held her stance for another beat, then softened. "I guess it's all right," she said quietly. "It'll be early, anyway, and everyone will be in a rush to get us out the gates." She took the few steps that separated them and wrapped her arms around his waist, holding on through his start of surprise. "I'll miss you," she whispered, and his next breath shuddered on the inhale.

"Yeah," he said hoarsely. His hands came up to her shoulders, not gripping, just resting there. He closed his eyes. "I love you, you know," he said suddenly, pushing the words out before he could change his mind. It was a near thing-- it wasn't something they talked about, ever, though he rather thought they both knew. He wasn't sure why he was saying it now, except for that he probably wouldn't have another chance, and it deserved to be said.

Kairi's shoulders shook once, and her head tucked down against his chest. "I love you, too," she said. "I'm sorry."

Riku snorted, rubbing his hands up and down her arms. "Not your fault," he said. "We knew this would happen eventually."

She lifted her head, and if her eyes glimmered wetly he didn't make any comment on it. "We could still run away together," she joked weakly, trying for a smile. "Go live in the wilds, leave all of this behind."

Riku tipped up his chin, making a show of considering it, then shook his head with a regret that wasn't entirely show. "They'd just come after us," he said. "And your father would never speak to me again. Which means that _my_ father would never speak to me again, because he's far too enamored with your herds."

He won a giggle from her, and the clutch of her hands loosened. Riku hesitated, then gave in and let himself draw her close, leaning down until he could reach her lips. She made a startled, needy little sound when he held the kiss, and Riku felt warm all over when one of her hands came up to the back of his head, keeping him in place.

When they finally drew back, neither of them was breathing steadily. Kairi stepped back, one hand coming up to cover her mouth; her other drifted up, touched two fingers to Riku's lips like an echo.

Head up, she turned and walked away. Riku closed his eyes, keeping them closed until he heard the door thump shut behind her.

***

The weather was with them the following morning, and for once all of the final details worked themselves out smoothly and without delay. Which meant that the little caravan of horses and wagons was rolling through the gates in the outer wall just as the sun was cresting the horizon. They struck out north and east along the main road, the sun in their faces, and quickly left the Heartlands behind.

Kairi had told herself over and over that she wouldn't look back, but she did. Just the once-- just long enough to see the pale blur of Riku's hair vanishing into the trees. It was as heartening as it was heart-breaking-- that he'd come to say goodbye after all, and that it had been necessary in the first place. The memory of their first and only kiss was warm on her lips as they rode on.

They made their waypoint by sundown, as planned, after a smooth day of travel. The next day dawned dull but didn't live up to the promise of rain-- and the next was clear from dawn onward. The knot in Kairi's stomach grew as they came closer to their destination pace by easy pace.

It was another sunny midday when the advance rider reported a small party coming their way, and quickly. Everyone put their hands on their weapons, despite the fact that no one expected trouble this close to the capital, with the King's Riders out on every road-- it always paid to be prepared. Although Kairi couldn't possibly have prepared herself for the party that pulled up their horses alongside her, or for the bright eyes in a very familiar face that stared over at her rather sheepishly.

"Sora?"

"Yeah, hey. Man, you guys made good time-- I was hoping to catch you before you'd come all the way here." He lifted a hand and scrubbed at his wild brown hair, mussing it even further; on either side of him, his two seconds exchanged unreadable looks.

"What do you mean?" Kairi said carefully. "What's going on?"

"There's trouble," Sora answered shortly. He cast a quick glance at the rest of her party, and the open space around them. "Look, you stayed at Rosemont last night, right? Let's get back there before nightfall, and I'll explain everything once we're settled for the night."

"Back to--" Kairi cut herself off, looking at the expression on Sora's face, and a few unwelcome suspicions clicked over in her mind. "What kind of _trouble_ is it," she asked quietly, "and why does it mean that your entire band of Riders is heading towards my home?"

The look Sora gave her at that was pained, bordering on stricken. Which was answer enough, really. She shook her head when he made to open his mouth again, turning her horse with a quick jerk of reins. "No, you're right, let's get moving. But I expect the whole story when we stop."

It was a hard push, riding at speed all the way back to the household they had lodged at the night before-- it meant that her party's horses were going to be too tired to ride the next day, she realized in frustration. There wouldn't be enough remounts for both her party and Sora's Riders, and it was a sure bet that the Riders were going to take priority and push onward as soon as they could the following morning.

Before that happened, though, she intended to get answers. And so when they came thundering through the gates at Rosemont just after dark, she barely waited for Sora to finish explaining their presence to Lady Belle before she dragged him away to a quiet room just off the library. His seconds, Donald and Goofy, fell in behind them wordlessly.

"Okay," she said as the door closed behind them. "Talk."

Sora flumped down on one of the room's heavily-cushioned chairs, took a deep breath-- and did.

By the time he was finished Kairi was sitting as well, feeling chilled despite the fire slowly dying in the hearth. She thought she had probably gone pale as she stared at the rough maps that Donald had produced-- illustrating quite clearly the pattern of attacks over the past several months, tracking the increased monster activity in the borderlands. Bold red marks had been traced over the villages and settlements that were simply-- no longer there.

All of it was closing in quite clearly on the area where the extensive borders managed by her family met the wild outer lands where Riku's people lived. She remembered Riku's voice again in her memory, deliberately brushing off the increasing monster activity, and she shivered.

"So the King is sending you out to investigate?" she asked when it seemed like Sora was done.

Sora nodded slowly. "Kind of, yeah," he hedged, and held up his hands defensively when she glared. "We're more like the advanced guard, really. The King is mustering the entire army," he admitted, "and calling in additional forces from all of the nobles' household guards. The other Riders are all going out delivering the messages. I'm supposed to do a quick check on some of the outposts and then meet up with the clans to see if we can't go out and find who we're supposed to be fighting."

Kairi was speechless for a long minute. "That's," she started, and shook her head. "He's that sure it'll come to a fight?"

"Mickey asked Yen Sid to do a scrying," Sora said by way of answer, making Kairi blink in surprise. The old wizard was notorious for being reclusive, even towards his long-time friend, the Ageless King. She couldn't remember another time when Yen Sid might have been directly involved with the activities of the Kingdom. "It-- wasn't good. He wouldn't tell us all of what he saw, just said that there was some dark magic at work in the south and that we'd need a lot more than a few Riders to deal with it."

"Sweet gods," Kairi muttered, rubbing her hands over her face. It would be a war, was what Sora was saying, against some mysterious enemy none of them had even seen yet. And she, apparently, had left her lands and her family right in the center of it all.

"Hey," Sora said quietly. She looked up to find him smiling encouragingly. "We'll figure it out. Mickey's on top of it, and he's not about to let anything happen to the Kingdom or its allies. You know that, right?"

She managed to drag up a smile of her own. "Of course," she said firmly, and almost convinced herself that she meant it.

Kairi glanced at the maps again, considering, but suddenly the prospect of going to find her own bed was irresistibly strong; she felt wrung out, drained from the days of travel and the worry and the meaning of Sora's words. So instead of poring over the details again-- and probably getting nothing new out of it-- she bid a quiet good night to Goofy and Donald and moved back out into the hallway.

Sora followed her out. His courteous hand on her elbow changed to a clasp around her wrist once the door was shut behind them, prompting Kairi to turn to face him. He smiled thinly at her, visibly nervous. "This is for your father," he said, holding out a sealed envelope. "I hope you don't mind delivering it. And, uh. This is for you." He took a deep breath before digging into his pocket and bringing out-- a ring.

"I'm sorry to do it like this," he said quietly, waiting for her startled nod before lifting her hand. She watched with a certain numbness as the slender gold band was slid onto her finger. "With everything that's happening, I don't know that we're going to have time for a ceremony anymore."

"Probably not," she answered-- the promise of battle took precedence over more peaceful pursuits, just as it always did. Whatever might have been intended when the messages were sent back and forth over the past few months, it was anyone's guess what would happen now.

Not that the actual wedding ceremony would have had much of a purpose. She and Sora had been promised to each other so many years before that they were for all intents already married. All of the arrangements, the paperwork and the legalities had already been completed; the ceremony was just for show, a formalization of what everyone already knew.

Kairi stared down at the little gold band on her finger for a long time, wondering how it could be so light for a thing with such heavy meaning.

Sora grinned at her, a little sheepish, a little hopeful; she swallowed hard and dug in her pouch until she found her own ring to exchange. She held her breath as she put in on him, feeling his calloused palm warm against her own, and then waited after to see if he would--

But he just looked at her again, the expression in his eyes seeming-- a little sad, somehow. When the silence had stretched nearly long enough to become awkward, he cleared his throat. "Long day tomorrow," he said, putting on a grin. "And the one after that, and the one after that-- I'll see you when things get a little more settled, yeah?"

He waved at her over his shoulder as he turned away and vanished back the way he'd come, leaving her to go to her room alone. It was the same room she had slept in the night before; the fire had been relit and the linens changed, and the entire thing smelled faintly of lavender. Despite her weariness, she settled by the hearth, thinking, twisting the ring around and around on her finger. She thought about Sora sitting across from her over his maps, serious and fierce as he discussed his upcoming mission. If she'd had any doubts about him, they would have been laid to rest then-- he was a good man, truly, and the King's most loyal Rider. He was handsome, and he made her laugh-- when they weren't facing a war, at least. Politically, it was a very good match. And even though they hardly knew each other outside of occasional letters and even rarer visits over the years, they had always got along very well.

She could have been happy with him, she thought. If it weren't for Riku.

But that wasn't fair at all. She was Sora's betrothed-- his wife, now, as far as the Kingdom was concerned-- whether Riku was a factor or not. She should have been grateful that she could possibly feel something for Sora, too-- at least the situation wasn't a total loss.

She looked at the ring on her finger again, then doused the lamps and went to bed. She didn't sleep well that night, but at least when she did sleep she didn't dream.

Sora's Riders was gone when she woke, as expected, taking every spare mount in the stable with them. Kairi spent the morning pacing around the castle trying to be patient while their horses rested and their packs were resupplied. When they did get back on the road, the weather had finally decided to turn on them; they rode out in a thick, clinging drizzle that made them stop earlier than expected. They stayed an extra day at the waypoint that evening, after the heavens opened completely and made it so that their horses were having trouble finding footing.

The road before them seemed, to Kairi's impatient eyes, to stretch on forever.

When the walls of her home finally came into view, Kairi kicked her weary horse to a faster pace and clattered through the gates ahead of the rest of her party. She went straight to her father's hall and inside-- just in time to find a dusty band of familiar figures, Riku included, conferring with her father in heavy tones.

Riku's eyes lit up when he spotted her, but then went directly to her hand where the ring was suddenly very heavy on her finger. He didn't quite look her in the eye after that.

She caught up with him after, as he was leaving the hall-- dressed for the field, his weapons strapped securely in place about his body. "Leaving so soon?" she asked, trying to force a light note.

He gave her a tight smile, to show that he appreciated her efforts, but shook his head. "We're heading out into the wilds as soon as we leave here. Your-- the Riders are waiting for us at one of the border outposts," he added, the pause and correction blindingly obvious. "We're going to meet them and move further out together, try and get some more information. With any luck, we'll find some clues as to what's causing all of this."

"Be careful," Kairi said quietly.

"Always." He took a breath, as if to say something else, then let it out silently. "We should be back in a few weeks," he went on eventually. "The plan is for us to scout things out and then come back to report once the main bulk of the Kingdom's army is ready to move. Unless the patterns change between now and then, they'll probably be mobilizing here."

"The steward is going to love that," she murmured wryly, and startled a quick laugh out of him.

"Oh come on, you know that he lives for creative crisis management." He gave her a slanted smile that mostly extended into his eyes, a smile that wilted again as he chewed the corner of his lip and touched her hand briefly, right above the ring. "Don't worry," he added with a hitch to his voice, "I'll bring us all back home safely."

And then he was gone, striding off to join his kin as they headed towards the gates.


	2. Chapter 2

As they passed beyond the final wall surrounding Kairi's city, Riku lifted his head to gauge the sun, trying to calculate whether they could make it to their campsite before nightfall. Not that the sun's absence would matter very much to _him_ , but their borrowed mounts still needed light to see. And while he could certainly lead the horses, he didn't really want to put himself in the position of explaining to their Kingdom escort just _how_ he was doing that. They were Kairi's people, they didn't hold quite the same degree of prejudice against the Dark that those further into the Kingdom were rumoured to have, but still. He wasn't about to go around advertising the fact that he had more of an affinity for it than most.

He hadn't even told _Kairi_ just how far that went, though she'd probably guessed. She had always been able to see right through him.

Riku squinted at the sky, not really seeing any of it, until a hand fell on his shoulder and startled him out of it. He whipped his head around and was somewhat embarrassed to see Cloud riding close beside him-- he hadn't even noticed the other man's approach; some hunter he was.

"You okay?" Cloud asked quietly.

Riku shrugged stiffly, keeping his silence. He'd never tried to keep his feelings for Kairi a secret from those close to him, and he and Cloud had grown up in the same camp; of course Cloud would know that he was upset. But Riku didn't want to talk about it. He didn't really know what to say, what words to use to get around the tight feeling in his chest.

Kairi was married to someone else. No amount of talking would make that any easier to stomach.

Thankfully, Cloud let the matter drop after a few moments of continued silence. It probably wasn't coincidence, though, that Zack rode up to fall in on Riku's other side a very short time later, striking up a cheerful, one-sided conversation. It was a familiar, soothing pattern: Zack talked about nothing in particular, while Cloud mostly just listened with a tolerant look on his face. Eventually, Riku relaxed enough to fill his own place in the routine, giving the expected dry responses to Zack's more outrageous statements.

It made his two friends look a little smug, but he was willing to overlook that. On some level he did appreciate the distraction, even if he knew it wouldn't last.

Zack and Cloud had Recognized early, and it showed in the way they interacted. The two of them worked together seamlessly in everything from fighting off monsters to cheering up their moping friends. Sometimes, if he concentrated, Riku thought that he could _feel_ the strength of the bond tying them together.

Riku himself had hoped for a while, with Kairi-- just daydreams and what-ifs that lingered long after he realized they would never come true. He had imagined waking up one day with the tug of her in his heart, despite the fact that she didn't have any of his people's blood, despite the fact that they'd known each other for years and showed no sign of Recognizing, despite the hundred other reasons against it. It was a nice dream, and the only way they would ever have been allowed to be together-- which was probably why he had clung to it for so long.

He had thought he managed to put the dream to rest, though. Thought he was prepared for it. But when he'd seen her standing there with that ring on her finger, well. He apparently hadn't been prepared at all, because damn it, it had _hurt_. He hadn't known until the inescapable proof was right in front of him just how strong the ghost of that old dream truly was.

He understood the situation all too well; he always had. Kairi's family and the lands they controlled were technically a part of the Kingdom, but only just; they were far from the capital and quite isolated from the neighbouring estates. In many ways, the Heartlands had more in common and in trade with Riku's people than with their own. But their horses were a valuable resource for the Kingdom, and their unofficial position as liaison with the outlands was equally valuable, more than fair trade for the protection that the famed Ageless King offered his citizens.

Naturally, the King would want to ensure that the Heartlands remained firmly tied to the Kingdom. And Sora was a King's Rider, one of the hand-picked members of the court that ran errands, scouted for the army, solved disputes-- whatever the King needed them to do. He was also the current champion and darling of the Kingdom. The Ageless King had no need of an heir, but according to all the reports Sora was a bit like his honorary son. A marriage to him would be just as good for an alliance.

The marriage between Sora and Kairi had been arranged when they were both children; it was simply the way things were and Riku had always known that. It hadn't stopped him from getting his heart involved, of course, but that was his own damned fault. In all fairness, he couldn't blame either of them for it.

Unfortunately, fairness had little to do with emotion, and since Riku would rather cut off his own shadow than get angry at Kairi, the as-yet faceless Sora was the only target he had left. And now he had to ride out and meet the little princeling and hold his hand through the wilds and somehow manage to not do anything stupid like, say, leave him out beyond his borders to rot. Riku couldn't even really _say_ anything against him, because what good would it do? He'd yell, Sora would get defensive, their respective friends would fall in at their backs, the entire upcoming journey would become devastatingly awkward, and _nothing would change_. Sora and Kairi would still be married, and Riku would still be left nursing a broken heart.

In his more petulant moments, Riku found himself wishing the Kingdom would just mind its own business. Riku's people had been looking after their lands for longer than the Kingdom had even existed, and they'd done a damned good job of it. So why couldn't everyone just leave well enough alone? It wasn't fair of him at all, because things had been getting a lot worse lately. Even if they didn't need the help now, they would soon; if the monsters kept swarming as they had been, the encampments would eventually get overrun, no matter how diligent the hunters were with their sweeps. All other things being equal, Riku could admit that.

Just-- why did it have to be _him_?

As the sun dropped towards the horizon, Riku rubbed his eyes and slouched low in his saddle. He was _tired_. They were _all_ tired, he knew-- even Zack's unquenchable smile was a little pinched at the corners. They had been pushing for days now; that much travelling and fighting and staying constantly on edge took its toll on a body.

They only just made it to their campsite before night fell, homing in on the familiar landmarks with weary relief. The party made short work of an evening meal, and of portioning out their remaining supplies and repacking them for the next leg of the journey. When Riku slept at last, it was deep and dreamless/

He was nudged awake in the pre-dawn dimness by a Zack-shaped shadow. They set out as soon as the light allowed, leaving the horses with their Kingdom escort-- it would be easier to travel by foot from there on. They passed by one of the border strongholds mid-morning-- Hollow Bastion, a great sprawling stone keep that had been abandoned for years except for a few rotating guards. From there it was just a short distance before they were in the familiar wilds of their own lands.

There wasn't much difference between the Kingdom and the outlands, unless you could feel it-- the Ageless King was said to have many powers, not the least of which was his affinity with the Light, and he held strong protection spells over his lands. Riku felt it like a vague pressure on his skin; stepping back outside the border was like standing up straight when you'd been hunched over for too long, or taking a deep breath after coming up out of water.

Not that the outer lands were completely without protections-- that was where Riku and his people came in. They held the largely unsettled territory to the south and west of the Kingdom. They divided themselves up into loose, family-based communities that much of the Kingdom had taken to calling clans-- Riku's people had let the name stick, mostly because the Kingdom seemed to like having _names_ for things, but the entire system wasn't nearly as strict as he knew some in the Kingdom believed. In the outlands, everyone travelled about quite a bit, moving between camps and outposts, roaming individually or in family groups. They didn't have permanent settlements, not to the scale of the Kingdom's cities; mostly they were nomads, going where the hunting or the growing conditions were good and moving on before the always-hungry packs of monsters that roamed the wilds could get used to their presence.

The young people of any camp tended to band together to keep the monsters away from their families; hunting parties like Riku's took it a step further, patrolling broad circuits through their claimed area. They were the ones responsible for tracking and monitoring the monsters on a broader scale, coordinating efforts to drive off the larger packs when necessary. They passed news and messages between camps, as well, and kept track of the movement of the herds and other noteworthy happenings.

Zack, with his eyes innocently wide and a teasing grin lurking around his mouth, had only once compared them to the Riders of the Kingdom. Riku hadn't spoken to his friend for three days after, though even he couldn't entirely deny the resemblance.

Riku's group consisted of Cloud and Zack, whom he'd essentially grown up with, plus some friends they'd made in the neighbouring camps over the years. It was probably immodest to say that they were the best at what they did but, well, out of all the other hunting parties Riku had met, they _were_. They worked well together, they got the job done quickly and with a minimum of injuries. Ironically enough, that was probably why it had fallen to _them_ to accompany the Kingdom's envoys into the wilds to search for their common enemy.

So close to the Kingdom, they were able to move a bit faster than they otherwise would have; monsters usually tended to keep a wary distance from the border magics. It meant that they could get away with fewer precautions, travelling in a group over the easiest ground instead of always watching their steps. It also meant that instead of posting watches at night Riku could use his abilities to ward their camp, setting a little wisp of Darkness to guard their sleep. It wouldn't keep anything really nasty out, but it would scare off the small fry and give him warning if anything bigger came too close.

They'd have to enjoy it while it lasted, because it was another of those things that he didn't want to have to explain to their Kingdom allies. Oh, it was possible that he could set his guard without any of the Riders noticing, but some were more sensitive to it than others and chances were good that at least _one_ of them would sense it. And even if they didn't, they'd certainly wonder why no one was guarding the camp. So once they met up with the Riders, it would be watch shifts and missing sleep once again.

Their meeting point was a much smaller watch tower further along the border, which hadn't seen active use in decades. There was a thin thread of smoke rising from beside the structure when it came into view at last. "Hunh," Zack said. "At least this group is bright enough not to try and camp _in_ the tower."

"What," Riku replied with a wry twist of the lips, "you weren't looking forward to fishing them out of the cellar?" Like they had the last group of border guards to pass this way, lured in by the promise of greater shelter under the tower's roof. They had been very lucky that Riku's party had passed close enough to hear them yelling before they starved to death down in that hole.

"Can't say that I was, no," Zack shot back cheerfully. "It's a miracle that we didn't fall through the floor, too; I don't want to test fate twice with the same trick."

As they rounded the tumbled remains of the outbuildings, the Rider's campsite came into view. The handful of figures gathered around the fire turned to face them almost immediately-- alert but not startled, which was interesting, since Riku hadn't seen a guard on their approach.

One figure in particular caught his eye, and Riku braced himself as that one broke away from the rest and took a few steps their way. Sora was-- not what Riku had expected from the Kingdom's best-beloved son, somehow. He was younger than Riku had imagined him, for one. He was shorter than Riku himself, with wild brown hair and sturdy, well-worn travelling clothes. His companions were similarly dressed; they'd set up their camp in a way that suggested they were no strangers to roughing it.

Riku deliberately slowed his pace, hanging back as long as he could while the two groups met and circled and started to mingle together. Sora and Zack started grinning at each other the moment they were introduced, cheerful exuberance oozing off them both, which had Cloud looking back and forth between them wearing a wary and long-suffering expression. Even Riku felt a twinge of foreboding, trying hard not to think about what life with _two_ Zacks would be like.

Riku stared hard at Sora while he absently greeted the other Riders, trying not to _look_ like he was staring. Sora was energetic, charismatic. He seemed capable enough, in the easy way he wore his sword at his hip and the familiarity with which he hefted a heavy travelling pack. He practically glowed to Riku's other senses, which meant that his heart didn't have many dark places at all.

 _Kairi could be happy with someone like that_ , Riku thought, and for a moment he couldn't breathe past the tightening in his throat.

Eventually there was no one left to hide behind, and Sora was right in front of him with a big smile and a hand extended in the Kingdom greeting. "You're Riku," he said. "Right? I've heard about you from Kairi. It's great to finally meet you."

Riku gritted his teeth behind closed lips. "I've heard about you, too," he managed to say, and made himself reach out to shake Sora's hand.

The moment their hands touched he felt the jolt, like someone puffing cold air across his neck or stepping on his shadow. It was unmistakable to anyone raised in the outlands: the first signs of Recognition. It took every ounce of Riku's self-control not to jerk his hand free and step away-- well, self-control and sheer paralysing shock, because _what the hell_. He couldn't even tell himself he'd imagined it, since Sora was frowning curiously down at his own palm and rubbing his fingers together like they'd gone numb.

Riku retreated as quickly as he could, withdrawing to the perimeter and looking pointedly outwards before Sora could question him or ask about Kairi, or just-- say anything at all. Before Riku's control failed him and he started actually _feeling_ the reaction that he was desperately trying to ignore. He could feel his friends' curious looks on his back as he crossed his arms and settled his feet, but he didn't turn around.

He heard the others start to lay out the maps and plans, go over their supplies. Riku just let himself fade into the background as the panic finally started to bubble up in his throat, tried to breathe as he wondered just what the hell he was supposed to do now.


	3. Chapter 3

Away from the border things weren't terribly different from the few unsettled stretches of the Kingdom, at least not on the surface. The trees were the same, the weather, the undergrowth and occasional rustling flurry of a fleeing animal. But travelling in the wilds carried an undercurrent of tension that was absent in the Kingdom: any of those animal sounds could actually be a monster instead, complete with claws and teeth and nasty temper. All too often the only way to tell if an approaching creature was animal or monster was to wait to be attacked, which is why it was better to just assume the worst and stay on your guard.

Thankfully, the Riders seemed to understand that. Riku hadn't been sure, at the outset-- people in the Kingdom just didn't think of it, near as he could tell, because most of them had never _needed_ to think of it. Even the few King's Riders that Riku had dealt with in the past, skilled fighters all, had been woefully oblivious to the dangers around them once they'd moved beyond their borders.

Sora's Riders watched the precautions their guides took and wordlessly incorporated them into their own routines. They had probably never ventured very far into the wilds before-- of course not, or else they wouldn't have needed guides-- but after a few days you would hardly have known from the look of them. They accepted the guidance of their outland allies with a gratifying ease, giving back no protest or bravado, and usually only needed to be instructed on anything once.

They were, Riku had to admit, quite good.

Riku spoke to Sora as little as possible as they all settled into the journey, and kept his distance as much as circumstances allowed. It made Zack give him all sorts of pointed and even exasperated looks, which Riku stubbornly ignored. They assumed he was holding a grudge over Kairi, of course. And he _was_ ; Sora's gloves usually hid his ring, but it was there, and every glimpse Riku got of it left a bad taste in his mouth.

But there was also the Recognition nagging at him whenever he so much as thought of Sora, and he was _not_ prepared to discuss that, not even with his closest friends. He was barely willing to admit to himself that it was happening at all. So he let Zack roll his eyes, let them all believe what they would, while he put himself on point and kept busy and gritted his teeth against the pull in his chest tugging him back.

They moved ever deeper into the wilds, pushing the edges of their usual territory. They knew generally what direction to take-- just follow the trail of monster sightings, aim for the areas where hunting parties had been having the most problems on their patrols. There wasn't anything so obvious a big beaten path through the woods, but there were signs if one knew how to see them; signs of animals moving in a hurry, signs of the occasional bloody struggle carved into the ground. It was enough to keep them on track.

Riku's people ended up doing most of the tracking, as Riku had expected. However, the Riders ended up being devastatingly effective at fending off monsters, once they got used to the idea, so it was an even trade. The first time Riku saw them in action-- _really_ in action, not just cleaning up the small fry or doing a routine sweep-- was when the party started through a narrow stream wash and was greeted with a rasping roar from entirely too close by. Riku's heart sank as something crawled out of a previously hidden den and flared out its spiny neck ruffs. It was a weredragon, an old one, the sort of monster that would normally have Riku backing off and sending out a call for reinforcements.

Sora went out there with just himself and his two seconds, and took down the creature with insulting ease. The mage, Donald, cast something that had the weredragon rearing up and pawing its eyes, at which point Sora slid right up to its vulnerable belly with Goofy's shield to shelter him while he struck the killing blow. It was over practically before it started.

Riku was left staring with his own blade dangling loosely in his fingers and his mouth gaping open. Luckily, he wasn't the only one-- Zack let out a low whistle as the Riders circled around to come jogging back, and Cloud's eyebrows were up near his hairline.

"Maybe we should start sending our aspiring young hunters to train with them for a while, hm?" Zack said cheerfully. The Riders who were close enough to hear responded with smug looks.

Riku didn't answer; Sora had just rejoined the group, and as he turned to grin at Zack's comment his gaze slid across Riku's and stuck there. Riku shivered and scowled and looked away, banishing his blade with a curt flick of the wrist.

After the weredragon they intensified their guard, expecting more such monsters on their path ahead. And at first they were right. But then, suddenly, it tapered off. The forward trackers found plenty of sign that there had been monsters about, and recently, but there were no attacks, not even a territorial howl in the distance, and everyone started to feel a little unnerved. Riku found himself wondering if they were going the wrong way after all, despite having seen all the evidence to the contrary; found himself straining his eyes at every clump of brush like it held an ambush. Zack-- and Sora-- kept up a determinedly cheerful air, but the tension wore at them all regardless.

Riku was walking point, a short distance ahead of the others, when he thought he heard a faint rustle in the undergrowth ahead. He instantly threw up a hand, every nerve on high alert, and heard the others fall breathlessly still behind him, waiting.

As the silence stretched, Riku was tempted to shake it off and dismiss the whole incident as just nerves-- it wouldn't be the first time, for any of them. But something made him hold his tongue, made him keep his hand up in that frozen gesture. He couldn't have said why, but he was convinced that it wasn't just another false alarm.

After a moment's internal debate, Riku licked his lips and carefully reached out through the darkness to scan the route ahead. It wasn't easy, scouting that way, and not terribly precise-- he couldn't actually _see_ his surroundings, he just got impressions, shapes and feelings and something like scent. But it was better than nothing, and he'd be damned if he took another step forward without figuring out what was wrong. So he stood with his eyes half-closed as he slipped and searched through the shadows striping the ground, trying not to imagine what he looked like to the Riders behind him.

He couldn't help his instinctive flinch as he felt something in the shadows ahead rear up and look _back_.

He stumbled back a step, only half aware of the others falling in around him-- of Sora stepping right in to his shoulder with sword held at the ready. The undergrowth ahead of them rustled once, faintly, then again. Then the shadows beneath a clump of shrubs shivered, stretched, and resolved into-- _something_. Something dark and hunched, with wide, unblinking golden eyes.

Riku couldn't look away from it. To his dark senses, still wide open, the thing was just a sucking emptiness, unlike anything he'd ever seen before. It was as fascinating as it was utterly horrifying.

For a moment they all just stared at it while it stared back, cocking its head back and forth in what looked remarkably like curiousity. Then-- it leaped.

It was surprisingly graceful as it jumped, arching high up before twisting down to land on one of Sora's Riders. It happened too fast for them to react, too fast for the man to even scream; Riku could only watch in stunned horror as the creature wrapped itself around the warmth and light that was the man's heart and snuffed it out like it had never been. The sight made Riku shiver, hard, like he might never stop.

Sora darted in and slashed at the thing. It _burst_ when his sword touched it, popping like a bubble and releasing a little flare of light. What was left of the shadowy body itself melted away into the ground.

They kept their weapons up for a long time after the thing was gone, holding a defensive circle, but no other enemies appeared. Cloud glanced Riku's way, his eyes asking the question; Riku braced himself before throwing caution to the wind and casting out his senses in a broad search. Part of him cringed at the idea of brushing up against another of those things, but if there were more, if they were surrounded-- they needed to know, and _now_.

It seemed, though, that the countryside around them was as empty as it looked. Riku eventually shook his head and began pulling his senses back, taking a few deep breaths as he closed himself in again. The other hunters relaxed almost instantly, the Riders more slowly following suit.

"What," Aladdin said, "was that?"

"Gods, it killed Biggs--"

"You think there are more?" Tidus asked nervously.

"Probably," Riku said slowly. He couldn't have said why, except for the notion that they would never be so lucky as to only have to deal with _one_. And-- well, there had been something tickling at the edge of his senses as he'd searched. Something distant, impossible to recognize or understand. But it was there. "Not close, but-- yeah, I think so."

His voice wasn't as steady as he would have liked. And his hands were shaking, Riku noticed after a moment. Reaction to the creature, maybe, or just the aftermath of using his abilities-- it had been a while since he'd stretched himself quite so much. He'd be fine, given a few minutes to breathe, but--

Right on cue, Zack came up at his shoulder, looming like the mother hen he was at heart. Riku tried to wave him off with a smile even though he knew he'd have an easier time convincing Tidus to give up swimming. Zack would be satisfied only when he'd bullied Riku into a hot meal and a nap, and probably not a moment sooner.

Sora was watching him, too, Riku realized. Watching him very closely, with more than a casual concern. Looking like he was about two breaths away from starting to ask _questions_. Riku groped for something to head off the inevitable interrogation. "Your sword," he blurted. "Is it enchanted?"

When Sora blinked at him in utter shock, Riku realized belatedly that it was the first time he'd willingly started a conversation between them.

"What? Why?"

"You killed that thing. I want to know if there's anything about your weapon that's special or whether we'll all be able to do it." He was steadying. Even Zack was distracted by the question. This was good.

"Oh," Sora said, his expression clearing as comprehension dawned. "It's got a few basic enchantments, yeah, but nothing out of the ordinary."

"Like what?" Cloud asked.

"Rust proofing, ever-sharp," Sora rattled off immediately. "Stamina boost. The usual. We've all got something along those lines."

"Hm," Cloud said, his frown easing; Riku relaxed right along with him. Anything an ordinary sword could do, their spirit blades could usually do better, so-- Riku let out a breath as he realized that they could at least fight the things, whatever they were.

"We should move on," Jessie said, carefully not looking at where the unfortunate Biggs had been standing-- the spot where absolutely nothing was left to mark his absence. "It's not quite late enough to camp yet, right?"

Riku didn't even glance at the sky before nodding. Even if it _had_ been nearing nightfall-- it was a pretty safe bet that no one would actually sleep if they set up camp in that spot. Riku included.

They walked on in a tight, tense line, until they actually were running out of light, and then they settled in warily. The camp was a good one, at least: open enough that they could see anything coming before it was on them, yet sheltered enough to build a good big fire. The heat of the blaze had sweat prickling Riku's lip, but he wasn't going to be the one to suggest going without the fire's light.

Sora was the one to break the silence that developed. "Do you think," he said, "that maybe all of the other monsters, the ones we've been having problems with-- do you think they've been running away from those things?"

There was a rustle as everyone collectively started a little, sucked in a surprised breath. Riku's first instinct was to deny it; monsters weren't _scared_ of anything, they lived only to hunt and kill. But after that initial knee-jerk reaction faded he realized it made a grim kind of sense. The patterns they'd noticed, the mass movement of monsters out of the wilds, the unpredictability of their actions and the extra aggression when they were cornered-- if you looked at it right, it did seem to form a pattern. They hadn't gone mad, they weren't invading. They were running scared.

The reason that no monsters had attacked lately was that the monsters had all moved on. Because the forward edge of the new invasion was coming in fast.

"What can scare a monster?" Cloud asked quietly.

Riku shook his head. "I guess we're going to find out."


	4. Chapter 4

"So what do we do?" Riku asked. As usual, the sound of his voice made Sora want to shiver, but he was getting more used to it these days. Didn't mean that he'd stopped freaking out a little each and every time, but at least he could usually keep himself from _actually_ shivering.

"What _can_ we do?" Cloud shot back, challenging. Zack's head was swinging back and forth between them, following the exchange. It was perfectly obvious that the three of them had worked together for a long time. Probably as long as Sora himself had with Donald and Goofy; they had the same kind of wordless understanding between them.

Riku held up one finger. "First option, we turn around and go back, report the existence of those things, and wait until the Kingdom's army is ready to meet the attack."

"Not a bad idea," Zack said mildly, but Sora could tell his heart wasn't in it.

"Second option," Cloud cut in, "we keep going and try to find out more. Figure out where these things are coming from, or at least how many we're going to be up against."

"Third option," Zack jumped in gamely, then paused, letting out a puff of breath. "Yeah, I've got nothing. Guess there's only the two, unless you guys can think of something else?" He raised his eyebrows to Sora, who shook his head slowly.

"Think you've pretty much covered it. I vote for going on," he added. "I mean, I wouldn't mind sending a message back to the King to at least give some kind of warning." _In case we don't make it back_ , he left unsaid. He didn't need to say it; he was pretty sure they were all thinking it. "But we don't really _know_ anything yet. I think we can still do some good out here."

There hadn't even been a body. He kept coming back to that, somehow. Biggs had just been-- gone, his body fading from sight like the thing that had killed him. Like the shadow had eaten whatever held him together. Something that could do that-- well.

Not making it back was a definite possibility.

His Riders exchanged looks. "It's a risk," Tron said while the others nodded, "but I tend to agree."

"All right, then," Zack said. "Let's do this."

Within the hour they were on the move again, the main part of the group continuing south while a distressingly vulnerable party of three started back north with all haste. Sora had argued for sending more-- one lone Rider and a pair of hunter escorts did not seem a match for the who-knew-how-many monsters they might come across. But he had been assured that three could avoid or hide from things that more couldn't. And really, he did know just how good the hunters were at what they did. In the end he had let himself be convinced.

No one watched the three leave; they were already moving forward on high alert, eyes glued to the puddles of shadow beneath trees and around rocks, with standing orders to call out if they even _thought_ something seemed off. Riku was walking point again, but closer now, just a few steps ahead of the main party. His head swung back and forth, hypnotic, as he scanned the ground ahead of them.

Sora realized he was watching Riku again and gave himself a shake, jerking his attention back where it belonged. Told himself yet again that he knew better and should _stop_ , already. It wasn't right, or fair-- he was perfectly aware you couldn't ever control who you were attracted to, but he was _married_ now, and he couldn't very well go up to Kairi and say _hey, I seem to be fixated on your best friend, hope you don't mind_?

He knew all of that, and had reminded himself of it constantly since they'd started this whole venture. But this? This wasn't like any crush he'd had before. He'd tried to ignore it, to shake it off, and just couldn't. It was turning into an obsession.

The whole situation wasn't helped by the fact that Riku was-- well, he was _cool_. The way he tracked, following seemingly invisible signs on the ground; the easy way he held his blade; his dry, snarky sense of humour-- the one that only seemed to come out when he was talking to his own people, sadly. Every time Sora got close to him his mouth snapped shut faster than one of Atlantica's famous clams.

Sora was trying hard not to take it personally, he really was. He just wished he knew what the hell the guy had against him. He'd kind of hoped-- well, Riku was Kairi's friend. Sora had hoped he'd be _Sora's_ friend, too.

At least they all weren't like that, or the trip would have been a nightmare of sheer uncomfortableness. Tidus and Wakka had promised to teach them a clan sport called blitzball. Selphie and Olette had immediately bonded with Jessie over being the only girls in the company of guys. Zack was just a great guy all around, and Cloud was quiet but you could still tell he was laughing a lot of the time when Zack teased him. All of the hunters were cool people, and incredibly capable at what they did.

It was still odd to look at them and not see any of them carrying a weapon, but it had only taken the first fight to satisfy his curiousity on that front-- he'd never forget the sight of Zack holding out his hand and calling up a massive sword that the castle's blacksmith could only dream about forging, just pulling it out of mid-air. Cloud's was similar, just as impressive-- they were _all_ impressive, though Sora had to admit himself partial to Riku's, with its odd, twisting lines. It didn't look like a weapon, really, which made it all the more stunning when you saw it in action and realized just how deadly it was.

Sora had to shake his head at himself when he noticed that his thoughts had gone right back around to Riku again. Sighing, he gave in and let his eyes drift over as they walked.

Concern made him give Riku a critical eye, one more time; the hunter had been pale and shaky after that _thing_ had attacked them, but he seemed all right now. Part of Sora still wanted to push, wanted to find out what had been wrong so that he'd be prepared for it next time-- but he had the distinct impression that he'd get nowhere with Riku if he tried, so he satisfied himself with knowing that whatever had been wrong at least Riku had recovered from it now.

They walked through the rest of the day and started setting camp the moment the light started to fade. They didn't have to discuss it, it just happened; they all wanted to be secure before darkness fell. Crowding in around the campfire with the rest, Sora looked around and measured the tension in the air and smiled to himself ruefully. If any one of them slept that night it was going to be through sheer willpower alone. Thankfully, they were all experienced enough to know that they _had_ to sleep, and presumably would know ways to wind themselves down enough to rest despite the nerves. Sora was already starting into his own breathing exercises as he finished his meal.

Everyone froze as one of the guards hissed an alert. Then as one they grabbed for their weapons-- visible and otherwise-- and turned to where a patch of shadows was shifting, growing.

"So, you're here after all," a voice drawled out of the night. "I owe Luxord twenty; he insisted that you guys were dumb enough to come all the way out here but silly me, I thought you were smarter than that."

When the twisting shapes resolved, Sora saw that it wasn't another of those creatures after all-- it was a man. Tall, thin and angular, dressed in a long black coat and a concealing hood which he pushed back when he got close enough. The man's hair was bloody red in the firelight, and the black marks etched under his eyes gave his expression a sinister edge.

"Who are you?" Riku demanded. He was unnerved by something. Sora wasn't sure how he knew that but he did, sure as anything: Riku was trying very hard not to freak the hell out just then, as he stared the stranger down.

"Nobody of consequence," the stranger said with a razor grin. "Just passing by, thought I'd stop to say hello. Maybe give you some friendly advice while I was at it."

"Yeah?" Sora challenged, tightening his grip on his sword. "And what's that?"

"Run away home, boys and girls," the stranger answered, instantly. "Before you get in over your heads."

Zack snorted. "Too late," Sora heard him mutter.

The stranger must have heard him, too, because he gave a slow shrug. "Probably, yeah. But you never know. If you start running now, maybe you can get back to the border before the heartless catch up."

"Heartless," Sora jumped on the word. "You mean-- that creature we killed?"

"Ooh, sounds like you've had a bit of excitement already. Let me guess: small slinky thing, long antennae, kind of cute until it rips your heart out and eats it whole?" The stranger laughed and started walking, pacing a slow circle around the perimeter of the camp, staying just at the edge of the firelight. "You'll be in for one rude awakening if you expect _them_ to be the worst thing you find out here."

Sora caught himself turning in a circle to keep the stranger in sight; from the shifting around him, he wasn't the only one. "So tell us, then. What are we in for?" He paused. "And who _are_ you? Do you control those things?"

"Now, now. Can hardly go around giving away all our secrets." The stranger reached his starting point and turned neatly on his heel, starting to pace in the other direction. "Why should I spoil the surprise?"

Tidus made a frustrated sound. "Stand _still_ , would you?"

"While you're at it," Aladdin added, "come in here where we can see you." He picked one of the half-burned branches out of their fire, brandishing it in the stranger's direction. "Why are you hiding out there in the shadows? You scared of the light?"

The stranger threw his head back and laughed and laughed. "Oh, silly children," he said as the last chuckles faded. "You have no idea."

The stranger lifted his hands, and Aladdin yelped as the smouldering branch practically exploded in his hands. The flames spread in a heartbeat, arching around the camp in a solid wall, caging them in. For a moment Sora could hardly breathe-- the heat of it was incredible, overwhelming, especially since seconds before the air had been autumn-cool. He staggered back a step by reflex, then flinched as he ran into the heat being given off by their own campfire, now a tall pillar of orange reaching for the sky.

Donald was just choking out the first words of his ice spell when the fire died out, suddenly, without even a wisp of smoke or a charred blade of grass to show it had been there at all. The lingering heat was making the air waver, though, and Sora wasn't the only one sheeted with sweat.

The stranger was gone.

Dead silence held for a moment while they all stood frozen in place. Sora finally drew in a shaky breath. "Did I just imagine that?" he ventured.

It earned an equally shaky laugh from Zack. "Not unless you also imagined me up a sunburn, because that's what my face feels like right now. What the _hell_. Who was that guy?"

"He's like those other things," Riku said hollowly, staring out into the darkness. "He's-- not exactly the same, but almost. It's like he wasn't even there."

Riku's face was pale as a sheet. Concerned, Sora took a step towards him, but Cloud got there first and put a hand on Riku's shoulder. Riku started, his head jerking around to look at Cloud; moments later he shook himself and took a deep breath, his face shuttering. He didn't look at Sora-- at any of the Riders.

It wasn't the first time that Sora had wondered what kind of power Riku had. He wasn't a mage; Donald had quietly confirmed that not long after they started out. But there was definitely something there, something that the other hunters knew about but which no one was willing to discuss with outsiders.

Sora was dying of curiousity, of course, but he hadn't yet given in to it. Some day, he was determined, Riku would trust him enough to tell him, but for the moment there were other things to worry about.

"Right," Sora said decisively. "Sleep. That's what we need to do right now. We can talk this over in the morning, while we walk."

He didn't suggest turning around. No one argued.


	5. Chapter 5

They did talk about it in the morning-- they talked it up and down and round in circles and got precisely nowhere. They could all agree that there was far more going on than an overabundance of monsters, at least; the more they looked at it, the more likely it seemed that the new creatures-- _heartless_ , the stranger had called them-- were responsible for the monsters' erratic behaviour. And the more they looked at it, the less it seemed like an accident. The stranger hadn't come right out and said it, but it was a pretty easy guess that there was an intelligent mind behind everything.

Maybe more than one. The stranger had said _our_. Whoever he was, _whatever_ he was, he wasn't alone.

In the end, it came back to the fact that they desperately needed more information. So instead of turning around and following their three messengers back towards the border, they increased their watches and pressed onward.

As they moved further south, the relatively flat forest and brushland they had been travelling through rapidly gave way to rougher terrain. Ahead was the mountain range that dominated the skyline throughout the plains. Their party was only just starting into the foothills, but the air was already colder, with a damp bite that reminded Sora of snow, and it was a little alarming how much they were climbing already. The trail ahead seemed to point them right up into the white-shrouded peaks; Sora eyed it suspiciously and edged closer to the nearest hunters.

"So, uh," he said, "do you think we'll end up going all the way over?"

Zack gave him a bright grin. "Don't worry, there are plenty of passes. Most of them are even wide enough to let two people walk through at once."

Cloud smacked Zack's shoulder, and Zack yelped a protest; the entire thing had the worn, comfortable air of routine. "These may be the same mountains you're used to seeing, but down here they're not quite the same as they are in your Kingdom," Cloud said. "There's not much on the other side."

Sora blinked. "Wait, is this-- the Olympus Range? The same one that cuts into the east end of the kingdom right near the Heartlands?" He blinked again at Cloud's nod. "Hunh." Obviously he should have paid more attention to his maps. Like, a _lot_ more, if he'd missed something that big.

Zack chuckled at Sora's expression and took pity on him. "Don't kick yourself too much. The mountains run in a pretty straight line across this part of the outlands, but further east they kind of curl northward and double back on themselves to meet the border of the Kingdom. It's easy to miss if you don't have a map of the whole outlands, which most people in the Kingdom don't, especially given how different the range looks in your part of the world."

Sora thought about the mountains he was familiar with, low and worn and rounded, with green valleys on either side. He looked ahead at the sharp lines of rock and couldn't make himself reconcile the two images. "What's it like up there, then?"

"It doesn't really come down again on the other side," Cloud said quietly, "just spreads out into a wide open plateau. Very few trees, and much colder, dryer weather. It's beautiful, in its own way, but harder to live with."

"You've been there?" Sora asked curiously.

Cloud shrugged. "A few times. Never for long. There aren't many camps beyond the mountains, not when the lowlands are so much more hospitable. I don't think anyone would bother if there weren't certain plants that only grow there, and herds of wild sheep that like the upper slopes."

Zack was nodding. "Even then, the people that use those resources usually only live up there for part of the year, coming back down to greener territories the rest of the time. So the hunting parties don't make regular patrols up there, just the occasional exploratory mission."

"Hunh," Sora said, thinking that over, and then he bit off a groan and rubbed fiercely at his eyes. "So, basically you're saying that there's a big empty stretch of land up there where, say, a group of strange people bent on world domination could have been building an army for a while without being noticed."

Both Zack and Cloud's eyes widened, then went kind of grim and tired. "Something like that, yeah," Zack replied.

"Great." Sora sighed, and eyed the path ahead once more. "We're so climbing the mountain, aren't we."

"Hope you packed your woolies," was Zack's helpful reply.

They spent the next several days picking their way through a series of canyons, trying to avoid being exposed on the upper ridges while at the same time worrying about getting trapped in the bottom of the ravines. It was slow, frustrating progress, single-file more often than not, and frequently spent staring at their own feet to avoid slipping on piles of loose rubble.

They were in one such area when they came over a ridge and found another man in black waiting for them, leaving them the limited choice of falling back into what shelter was available-- a fractured area of gravel-covered rock-- or moving ahead to a horribly exposed but hopefully more stable area. It really wasn't much of a choice, even if it meant feeling like they all had targets painted on their foreheads.

Sora thought it was the same figure, at first: the red-haired man with the affinity for fire. But from closer up it was apparent that this one was taller, bulkier. When that black hood was pushed back, the revealed head had a broad, square jaw and brown hair. 

"Turn around," the new stranger said quietly.

"How about you tell us why, first?"

The stranger just shrugged, minutely, then lifted a hand and clenched his fist. And the mountain started to come down around them.

"Back, back, back!" Sora shouted, already following his own advice as their supposedly stable ground cracked and shuddered. Rocks began to fall from the higher ridges on either side of them, small at first but growing larger as the tremors increased. A tremendous crack, right overhead, made Sora look up-- too slowly, like he was moving through water-- to see a horse-sized slab of rock peel away from a cliff face and start tipping down towards him. The sight left him transfixed, watching in frozen stillness as the massive boulder broke free and started its descent.

"Sora!"

A body slammed into his shoulder; he heard someone grunt in pain, and then they were both falling. Sora lost all of his air as he fell shoulder-first into something unyielding, which meant he could only manage a faint gasp at the razor-scrape pain of gravel and debris as he continued to tumble and slide down a slope. He saw stars as he came to rest flat on his back, coughing weakly. Another body slid to a halt against his side.

Sora blinked open his eyes and kept blinking until the dust settled and he could see again. At which point he wheezed a curse as he noticed the flood of debris following them down the slope. He grabbed hold of his rescuer with both hands and started rolling them until they fetched up against a cluster of boulders.

Sora stayed as still as possible, with his arms wrapped protectively around what he thought was his rescuer's head, until he had caught his breath and the rumble-roar of falling rocks had stopped. In the thick silence that followed, he blinked open his eyes again.

He had what felt like a small, panic-induced heart attack when he saw Riku's face not far from his own, eyes closed and mouth slack. There was blood in Riku's silver hair, and on his face; a livid bruise was already swelling across the line of his jaw. But it wasn't long at all before Riku winced and frowned, groaning faintly as he tensed, and Sora heaved a relieved sigh.

Sora pushed himself carefully upright, scuffing his feet through the debris until he found solid footing underneath. The two of them were at least fifty feet down from where they had started, if the faces peering down at them from a ledge far above were any indication-- Sora eyed the slope they had come down and had to fight off a much belated bout of vertigo.

Riku was panting a little as he stood, and he stayed hunched over for a few minutes before straightening up and starting over to where Sora stood. He was favouring his left leg, picking his own steps with extra care.

"You all right?"

"Bruised," Riku answered, his voice clipped. "Be okay, just give me a few minutes."

Sora nodded, returning his attention upwards. He waved at the faces above, and was relieved when they waved back.

"Th' path forward's ruined," Goofy shouted down at him. "We'll have t' loop around back the way we came."

"Where's our friend in the cape?" Riku shouted back.

"Gone," Zack answered. 

"Of course he is," Riku muttered, just loud enough for Sora to hear. "We're stuck, why would he need to stick around and finish the job."

A faint aftershock shook the area, making the ground creak and sending a new flurry of pebbles tumbling down the slopes. Sora licked his lips nervously. "I don't think we'd better stick around here for very long."

Riku nodded. "We'll need to find our own way out of here; there's no way we're getting back up that hill, not without it falling on our heads first."

"Right." Sora took a deep breath, his thoughts whirring even though he'd pretty much already decided what his next words were going to be. "You guys turn around," he yelled, wincing at the echoes. He glanced quickly at Riku and found Riku looking grimly back, nodding his understanding. "Turn around and just keep going. Start for the border."

"What?" came the shouted reply. "But what about our mission?"

Sora shook his head. "Mission's over." They were in way over their heads; this latest development had certainly proved that. The men in the black cloaks, they hadn't been seriously trying to harm them-- it was a galling thing to admit, but it was true. With their powers, the strangers could have burned them all to a crisp, or dropped them into a hole and buried them under the whole mountain, but instead they had been warned and threatened and basically slapped on the wrist. Sora wasn't willing to bet their lives on getting a third warning. "We'll come back," he said firmly. "We'll work out a strategy and we'll come back, but right now we need to make sure we have the chance to tell the King about this."

"What about you?" Sora thought it was Cloud's voice, this time; the echoes off the stone distorted the words but it still kind of sounded like Cloud.

"We'll catch up."

"We're not just going to leave you down there--"

"We can't climb up," Riku answered flatly. "And you don't have the supplies to pull us up. We'd have to find our own route anyway. So, go; don't wait for us, just keep going."

"Like hell we will."

"Zack," Riku interrupted, with a crooked grin on his face that made something in Sora's gut clench. "Come on, you think I can't get us out of here?"

There was surprised silence for a second, then a barked laugh. "I see I need to give someone another lesson on humility when we're back home again."

"You can try. Worry about yourselves, so I don't have to."

"Right back at you."

With almost palpable reluctance, the faces peering down at them moved back from the edge until they were out of sight. And then it was time to run, as the earth muttered again beneath their feet. There was only one clear route out of the canyon they had fallen into, and Riku started down it without looking back, stumbling a bit at first and still favouring one leg, but regaining his stride as he went. Sora followed, but he couldn't keep himself from glancing back, just once, to that empty ledge, as he tried very hard not to wonder if they'd ever see their friends again.


	6. Chapter 6

Riku was frustrated, to say the least. Every time they picked a path that seemed promising it either doubled back on itself and sent them in the wrong direction, or dead-ended entirely. He was tired, his leg hurt abominably-- a particularly pointy rock had nailed it when he tackled Sora out of the way of the landslide, and the deep bruising was making sparks fire up to his hip with every step. It would fade as the damage started to heal, or at the very least he'd get used to it, but for the moment it was just one more thing going wrong.

He couldn't have done otherwise, though. He'd seen the rocks falling towards Sora and simply hadn't been able to keep still. He wasn't sure if that was the Recognition talking or just basic human decency, but either way, it left him stuck in the middle of nowhere, injured and potentially surrounded by enemies, with the last person in the world he would have picked.

Sora groaned as they came to yet another switchback turn, his voice echoing off the sheer rock walls on either side of them. "Not again."

Riku considered the new path, then looked up in an attempt to judge their direction-- nearly futile, with the sun and the sky obscured by rock, but he tried his best. "Come on," he said, turning around.

"You sure?"

"There was a side path a while back, it's a better option."

"But that one was really narrow, you said so yourself. Maybe we should keep going on this one a little further, it might turn again."

Riku felt too tired to argue, too tired to explain himself-- not that there was much to explain; he was going on instinct by now and that instinct was saying _forward_ was no good. So he just shook his head and started walking back the way they had come.

"Hey!" A hand caught his shoulder; by chance, it landed on one of his multitude of bruises, making his breath catch at the sting. Riku whirled, slapping the grasping hand away.

" _What_."

"I said, maybe--"

"I heard you."

Sora flinched a little at Riku's tone, something that looked like hurt flashing across his face. Riku ruthlessly crushed the little worm of guilt that chewed through him at the sight in favour of fanning the irritation higher. The heat of it was comfortable and familiar-- being angry at Sora was becoming a habit. And damn it, he was tired and hurt and lost and he needed to be mad at _something_ if he was going to have the energy to keep going.

Even as he watched, that flash of hurt on Sora's face was morphing into a similar anger, something fierce and wounded and probably long overdue. "Okay, you know what," Sora said sharply, "I've put up with you so far, but _seriously_. What the hell is your problem?"

"My problem?" Riku felt his lips stretch into an incredulous smile. "You want to know my _problem_ when we're stuck in a fucking canyon with a bunch of psychos and their heart-eating pets? Your timing is amazing, let me tell you."

"Considering that I'm going to be stuck in this canyon with _you_ for who knows how long-- yes, yes I do want to know. You've hated me since we met, what did I ever do to you?"

And there was the hurt again, seeping through Sora's words, which somehow took Riku from merely irritated to blindingly, _incandescently_ angry. Angry enough that all of the reasons for _not_ having it out right then and there went flying out of his head.

"You married Kairi," he shouted at the top of his lungs. "It should have been _me_!"

He managed to make himself stop there, panting, biting back the rest of the words that were crowded behind his teeth. The echoes that came down off the stone cliffs were loud and harsh, crow-calls. 

Sora looked blank, for about two seconds, then completely stricken. "I-- you--"

Just like that, just as quickly as it had risen, the anger was gone, leaving Riku cold and tired in its wake. Riku opened his mouth-- to argue, to explain, to say _something_ \-- but ended up closing it again in silence. He turned around again, began to backtrack.

Stopped, as the first golden-eyed heartless peeled itself out of the rocks ahead.

Adrenaline surged up to fill him with new energy; behind him, he heard Sora's muttered curse-- _stupid echoes_ \-- and quickened breathing.

"Guess we're going your way after all," Riku murmured. "Is the path clear?" He couldn't check himself, not without taking his eyes off the heartless, and that was just not happening any time soon.

"Yes," Sora answered after a pause.

"Then _run_."

They ran, pounding across the flat stretches and scrambling with careless haste over the rock piles and gravel slopes. They kept going long past the point where adrenaline burned out, until eventually they came out into an opening and staggered to a stop, daring to turn around and see what was pursuing them.

Nothing.

Riku's legs turned to water and dumped him on the ground. He hunched over his knees and tried to blink away the sparks in his vision, panted until the stitch in his side began to loosen.

Sora was flat on his back to one side, his chest heaving and his face grey with both dust and exhaustion. "If they're chasing us after all," he managed between breaths, "that's okay. I've decided they can have me."

Despite himself, Riku huffed a laugh. "You say that like there's a choice. If you can lift your sword right now, I'll eat my boots."

A long silence settled between them as they worked at catching their breath. Sora was the one to eventually break it with a quiet: "I'm sorry."

Riku didn't want to look, he really didn't. But he couldn't ignore it either, so in the end he took a deep breath and turned to face Sora.

Sora's head was turned, watching him, waiting until Riku's attention was on him before continuing. "I'm sorry about Kairi. It was arranged a long time ago. Us getting married, I mean-- good of the Kingdom, and all."

"I know that," Riku snapped with an echo of his earlier ire, but it was only half-hearted at best. He'd known the reasons for it, he'd always known; it didn't make any of it any better. Except-- except for how hearing it from Sora kind of _did_ , not in the sense that it fixed anything but in the way it shifted Sora from being the enemy to being just another person who'd had no say in the whole mess.

Sora was supposed to be upset about it; he was supposed to be mad at Riku for trying to steal his wife, or something, so Riku could just go on being mad right back. Or at the very least, he was supposed to just not care, so that Riku could hate him for that instead. Instead he sounded-- sad. Sad, and regretful, and a little bit lost.

"I never really minded it," Sora admitted quietly. "I-- well, I may actually kind of like Kairi a bit." He blushed, glancing away, and Riku mentally translated _a bit_ to mean _a whole freaking lot_. "I think I knew that she didn't really feel the same, but I never thought that she might actually have been in love with someone else. She never said."

_Neither did I,_ a ruthlessly fair part of Riku's mind pointed out, _not until it was too late._

"A lot of things make sense now, though. I would have called it off," Sora finished firmly, tilting his head back to meet Riku's eyes. "Please believe that. I never would have taken her away from someone she really loved, someone who loved her, if I'd known."

Pinned by that earnest stare, Riku eventually nodded. "Yeah, okay. I believe you." He winced a little, then, knowing what would have to come next-- he could practically feel his mother's ghost standing behind him, tapping her foot and frowning; _what do you say, Riku?_ Just in case he wasn't feeling guilty enough already. "I'm-- I'm sorry, too. I shouldn't have-- it's not your fault, I shouldn't have taken it out on you."

Sora accepted the grudging apology with a wide grin, sudden and brilliant and captivating. _Like the sun from behind clouds,_ Riku thought, dazed, and then: _oh, gods, did I really just think that?_ But he still wasn't looking away, even as his heart slowly sank.

He had briefly forgotten just why he'd been trying _so very hard_ to stay angry, why he'd willfully ignored all of the evidence that Sora was a good person. Not the least of which was the fact that Zack and Sora got on like a house on fire, and Zack was an excellent judge of character. But now that the issue of Kairi was out in the open, and Riku had been made to face up to the truth of the situation--

Riku looked at Sora, _really_ looked at him for maybe the first time since they'd met at that tower outpost. He looked at the blue, blue eyes and the weary slump of those shoulders and the thin cut over Sora's eyelid and the sweet, bright pulse of his heart. And Riku's breath caught as something in his chest tugged him forward, made him want with a sharp longing to go over and curl against Sora's side and rest there, back to back.

He gritted his teeth and turned away instead, levering himself unsteadily to his feet. He cleared his throat roughly. "Can you walk a bit further? This is too exposed; we should find a ledge or a cave something."

Sora gave a heartfelt groan as he pushed himself to his knees, pausing there before heaving himself up the rest of the way. "Yeah, I don't feel particularly comfortable out in the open, either. Though whatever kind of shelter we find had better be close."

"Agreed," Riku said fervently. He didn't think he was physically _capable_ of going very far; if they didn't find their shelter soon, they'd be camping in the open whether they wanted to or not.

Riku took a step and immediately stumbled, his bruised leg buckling beneath him. He would have fallen if Sora wasn't suddenly there under his shoulder. Riku closed his eyes against the not-entirely-unwelcome warmth of him, and didn't shake him off. _Couldn't_ shake him off, not without ending up back on the ground. He wasn't sure if that made it better or worse.

It was fine. He'd be fine; he'd ignored the nagging sense of Recognition so far, he could keep doing it. His reasons for resisting it might have shifted, but not enough to really matter-- Sora was still Kairi's husband, and it wouldn't be fair to any of them to complicate things even further than they already were.

No, he would just-- keep a lid on it. The pull eventually had to fade. He was pretty sure he'd heard of people denying Recognition in the past-- and so what if those stories mostly ended very badly for at least one half of the pair, there was a first time for everything.

He was stubborn enough to be that first, for Kairi's sake if not his own.


	7. Chapter 7

"Oh, gods," Riku heard Sora breathe. "If we didn't need to get back to the King before--"

They had finally made their way out of the maze of canyons and back into the lower foothills. From their vantage at the crest of one such hill, the massive army of heartless looked like it went on forever, filling not just the shallow valley below them but the one beyond that, and the ones beyond _that_. Black bodies spilled out onto the plains beyond, crawling over the rocky outcrops. And not just the little ones they'd faced to that point; there were bigger shapes among them, hulking creatures, ones that vanished and reappeared, ones that _flew_ \--

 _I hope the others made it out,_ Riku thought, _before this caught up with them_. He trusted his friends' abilities, and he knew they would have been watching their steps, but an army that size might have overtaken them anyway.

"What now?" was all he said aloud. The horde of heartless was, of course, sitting right between the two of them and the route they'd intended to take back to the Kingdom. Attempting to circle around it would mean weeks of delay while they backtracked up into the mountains. More like _months_ if they got lost in the canyons again, which they probably would. And by then, the heartless army would already be on the Kingdom's doorstep, facing down a defending force that had no idea about the full extent of what it was up against.

Not to mention that neither he nor Sora were carrying the proper clothing or gear for an extended stay at high altitude, especially with winter apparently determined to make an early appearance. Backtracking would mean Riku hunting or scavenging most of their food-- not something that usually lent itself to speedy travel-- and would doubtlessly end with them forced to share blankets for warmth-- not an entirely unappealing idea, Riku had to admit, but that was a huge point in favour of avoiding it.

Sora squinted down into the valley, eyes moving quickly as he took it all in. "We could wait them out?" he offered, though he didn't sound very enthusiastic about the idea. "Let them move onto the plains, then follow."

"Leaving us on the wrong side of an army," Riku pointed out. "We'd still need to get past them in order to beat them back to the border."

"Yeah," Sora agreed, sighing. He chewed at his lip for a while, then gave an awkward shrug and a lopsided grin. "Guess we've got to go through them, then."

Riku blinked at him, wide-eyed. Sora turned his attention back to the valley below and kept on talking. "It looks like they're mostly strung out through the hills here, rather than all concentrated in one place. Hills mean cover, which is more than we'll get on the plains. So, we pick a likely route, stay quiet, run like hell and don't stop until we reach the border."

"That," Riku said sourly, "is a dumbass plan."

"If you've got a better one, I'm all ears."

Riku looked down at the heartless, then turned to look back up at the mountain. Eventually, he grimaced and shook his head. "Still a dumbass plan, though, just for the record."

"Believe me, I know."

They waited until late the next morning, trading watches and resting uneasily to fill the time. It felt completely counterintuitive to try and sneak through enemy lines in broad daylight, but they both agreed that the darkness would be help the heartless more than it would them.

They kept in the lee of a low jut of stone until it tapered away into nothing, and then made a run across to a grouping of boulders. That was where they had their first encounter with the heartless-- the small ones, peeling out of the ground and staring up at them with big golden eyes. Sora had his sword out and was cutting them down before any of them could make a move. Riku held his breath as the last one faded away, his eyes darting and his back pressed to the stone, waiting. After several minutes passed in which no kind of alarm was raised and no wave of black bodies descended on them, though, he cautiously relaxed.

He glanced at Sora, who was just relaxing from a waiting pose of his own, and pointed silently towards another jagged line of stones a short distance away. Sora nodded, flexing his sword-arm, and they ran.

For a while, it seemed like Sora's crazy plan would actually work. The presence of so many heartless was driving Riku's dark senses crazy, like needle-pricks all over his skin. But they were a lot more spread out than they looked from above, and the big ones all seemed to congregate in the open spaces, away from the shelter that Sora and Riku clung to so desperately. They ran into more and more of the small heartless as they went further down, of course, but they moved fast and quiet and the deaths of those few never seemed to be noticed.

Riku actually started to believe that they might get through alive after all. Which was, of course, when they came sprinting around a jut of rock and found a figure in a familiar black coat leaning there against the stone.

Sora nearly fell as he abruptly switched from rushing forward to scrambling back; Riku liked to think he managed his own skidded stop a little more gracefully, dropping into a crouch as he threw his blade up in front of him. For a moment, the three of them just stood there-- from the look on her face, the strange woman in the coat was just as surprised to see them as they were her.

It didn't last long. One minute, they were holding their tableau; the next, Riku was diving to the side to avoid a crackling bolt of lightning that burned into the ground where he had been standing. He scrambled up and immediately dodged again, just barely avoiding the barrage of tiny knives as they whistled past.

He grabbed Sora's arm. "Time to run!"

Sora's return grin was more than a little manic. "All part of the plan, right?"

The woman was shouting, drawing attention, calling up more lightning to dog their heels. Riku fixed his eyes on the next bit of shelter, stretched out his legs and ran, with Sora only a half-step behind. The two of them swept their weapons in wide arcs to clear the heartless that were starting to pop up in their path.

The heartless were slow, Riku reminded himself. Slow, and from all evidence not very bright. If they could run fast enough, they might still be able to make it, so long as--

Pain flared in Riku's arm as some force slammed into him from the side, dropping him to one knee. He heard Sora say his name, felt Sora's hand on his shoulder-- heard, too, a low chuckle from one side and a high, whistling note. Acting on instinct, he half-tackled Sora and sent them both stumbling aside, and the next missile buried itself in the ground with a sharp crack and a burst of light.

_As long as that doesn't happen. Right._

"Are you all right?"

There was a man in a black coat standing on top of a rock cut a short distance away, his face marked by an eyepatch and a wide grin. Riku looked at him just long enough to note his position-- note the massive crossbow that the man was even then reloading-- and then he gritted his teeth and pushed back up to his feet. "Archer. Stick to cover."

"Riku--"

"Keep going, I'm fine."

The sharp pain in his arm was fading, replaced by a radiating numbness-- never a good sign, in Riku's experience, but at least _numb_ didn't make him want to pass out quite so much. There was no arrow in the wound, he discovered when he cautiously reached up to check, just a rapidly spreading wet patch that he didn't have the time to deal with. It wasn't his dominant arm, that was the important thing for now; the rest, well, he'd deal with it if they made it.

The world narrowed to just the next bit of cover, the next heartless in their path, and a tense straining to hear the archer's distinctive shot. There was a low rumble in the ground at one point that was dishearteningly familiar, but thankfully it never amounted to anything. From the brief glimpses Riku managed to get of the land ahead, they were getting closer, almost able to break past that last line of hill crests and start the descent onto the plains proper.

There was, of course, a dense knot of heartless between them and their escape, a writhing mass of the little one with a few larger forms mixed in. Riku and Sora skewed to the side, trying to skirt around the mass as much as possible, but they still ended up losing an alarming amount of their momentum as they fought their way through.

"My, my, you are determined," said a vaguely familiar voice from behind.

Riku slashed at a dark shape with wings and viciously hooked hands, then as it burst apart he used the end of his swing to turn around. Even across a sea of black, the blaze of bright hair on the figure standing behind them was unmistakeable-- as was the shimmering heat haze in the air around him. 

The red-haired man raised a pointed chakram, readied it to throw-- 

And paused. Just for a breath, a heartbeat. A twitch of the eye, not quite a wink. Riku's breath froze in his throat, burning his lungs.

The redhead threw. Riku grabbed Sora's arm and pulled them both flat to the ground. The chakram roared by over their head in a scorching blast of heat.

When Riku lifted his head, blinking his watering eyes clear, it was to see smoldering grass and smoke-- and a broad swath of clear ground where heartless had been just moments before, where the bolt of fire that had missed them had gone on to scorch the earth. Not about to waste the opportunity, Riku and Sora scrambled to their feet and ran, while the milling heartless filled in behind them and blocked the red-haired stranger from view.

Riku kept waiting for the second blast of fire to roar to life behind them, but it never came.

They kept running until the last spurs of rock that marked the foothills had passed behind them, through swaths of thick plains grass and shrubby thickets that tore at their exposed arms and faces. Riku would have kept running even then, feet moving by habit more than any active direction, if Sora hadn't stumbled to a stop and pulled Riku up beside him.

"You're still bleeding," Sora said by way of explanation, gesturing to Riku's arm. "Like, a lot. I think we've got a few minutes, at least, so let me bind that up before you pass out."

Riku blinked at Sora, then blinked down at his own arm-- the sleeve soaked red and sticking to his skin-- and finally nodded. He folded to the ground and set his forehead against his knees, feeling a little light-headed and panting weakly from the pain that was finally starting to come back. Sora's hands touched his shoulder, took hold of his sleeve and ripped. Riku gritted his teeth against the movement-- then jerked back sharply as new sensation shocked up his nerves.

He pried his eyes open to see Sora staring down at his own hands in shock, frozen mid-gesture. Riku followed the look, though he had a pretty damned good idea of what he was going to find.

 _Stupid, stupid, stupid--_

Sora's hands were bloody. Which, considering he was in the process of tying Riku's own blood-stained sleeve around his bleeding arm, was perfectly reasonable. But Sora was bleeding too-- mainly from a messy cut on his forehead, which was smeared as though, say, Sora had swiped at it to clear his vision before moving on to tending Riku's arm.

Sora had mingled their blood. Inadvertently, sure, but that didn't matter. The sense of Recognition, which Riku had managed to beat down into an annoying but mostly ignorable murmur, was roaring up again and making him sway towards Sora before he could stop himself.

"What," Sora murmured, rubbing his fingers together. "Riku?"

Riku shook himself sharply, jerking his arm out of Sora's weakened grasp and clumsily finishing the bandage himself. It was an extraordinary effort to stand up and turn away, but he managed. "We should keep going as long as we have light, or at least until we find a good place to hole up and rest. Something defensible." He looked at the sky, tried hard to focus on it instead of on Sora-- Sora, who he could _feel_ was standing up and taking a step closer. Sora, whose confusion and growing suspicion was a sour taste in the back of Riku's mouth.

Riku took a deep breath, and squared his shoulders. "We've come further east than we wanted, I think," he said, "though it's hard to say for sure. We should probably just go straight north and straighten ourselves out when we hit the border."

"Yeah," Sora replied after a long minute of silence.

Night was almost fully fallen by the time they literally stumbled on a grove of scrubby trees, with a sheltered clearing in the middle just barely big enough to hold them both. Riku collapsed back against a trunk and closed his eyes, weary enough to cry. From Sora's heartfelt groan as his legs gave out under him, he felt much the same.

Riku had just enough presence of mind to cast out a ward around their makeshift camp. It wouldn't stop anything really determined to get at them-- was more of an early warning system than a barrier-- but if the heartless were following them en masse they'd be screwed anyway, as tired as they were. "Sleep," he muttered, eyes already closed.

"We should," Sora slurred. "Should set a watch--"

"Just sleep. 'S taken care of."

Silence, for a long moment in which Riku wondered if Sora had already passed out. Then, finally: "Oh."

Riku thought, vaguely, that he should wonder what that meant, but then he was asleep.


	8. Chapter 8

When Riku woke, Sora was already awake, sitting up and staring at him in the moonlight. From the way Riku felt, it had only been a few hours at most since they stopped.

"Okay," Sora said, the moment Riku's eyes opened. "What the hell is going on? I literally can't stop thinking about you," he admitted, his eyes wild, "and that's a little weird. I mean, not that-- you're very-- but I _dreamed_ about you, okay? Real enough to be-- to be _real_. I feel like I could find you even if you were still back in one of those canyons somewhere, like I'd just-- know."

Sora stumbled into silence, cheeks flushed and breathing ragged. Riku winced, mostly because he knew the feeling.

All too well.

Riku lifted a hand and rubbed at his eyes, hard, like he could forcibly scrub away the fuzzy-headedness still clinging to him. He knew that he should make up some story, brush Sora off. But he was _tired_ , damn it; too tired to argue about it, too tired to even properly pretend that there was nothing going on. When Sora leaned in closer, like he couldn't quite help himself, Riku closed his eyes and shivered.

"Have you ever heard of Recognition?" Riku asked quietly. He waited for Sora's blink and frown before continuing. "It's something that happens for my people. Two people meet, their hearts acknowledge each other and form a-- a connection." It was strange having to put it in words. Even Kairi, who grew up in the Kingdom, had associated with them enough to know about it.

"You mean like Zack and Cloud?" Sora's puzzled expression was clearing. "I thought there was something about th-- oh. _Oh_. You mean-- you and me?"

Riku sighed, slumping back against the tree trunk. "Yeah," he said flatly. "You and me."

"But you said-- I mean, what about Kairi?"

_Yes, what about Kairi_ , Riku thought sourly. It was so stupidly ironic: Riku loved Kairi, Sora was married to her, and here they were both about to betray her in so many ways because of some twist of fate. "We don't get to choose who we Recognize. I love Kairi, yes, but this is different."

Riku could see the exact moment when Sora really got it: his gaze went wide and then darted down towards his ring finger. "Oh. Oh, man."

"We can try ignoring it. I did," Riku admitted. "And up until yesterday it was-- sort of working."

"Yesterday," Sora prompted.

Riku gestured towards his shoulder, which was starting to throb again now that he was paying attention to it. "You mixed our blood. That's a big part of how we usually make the whole thing permanent. Like I said, if you want, we can try ignoring it and see if it eases off. But--"

_But_ , the call of Recognition was a hundred times stronger than it had been before, and Riku had had trouble resisting it even then. _But_ , the urge to go to Sora was an aching need, distracting, grating like an improperly set bone. _But_ , the idea of going on like they had been made Riku's throat go tight and his hands clench to fists.

Sora took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Yeah, no, I really don't think that'd work." He visibly swallowed. "Okay. So what do we have to do? To make it-- er, permanent, like you said. That would help, right?"

"Probably, yeah. It wouldn't feel quite so overwhelming, anymore."

"What would it be like?"

"Usually, Kingdom folks end up thinking about it as a kind of marriage. Which is close, I guess, but not quite right. It's more than just a vow and a ring, it's you and me, inside each other's heads. Sharing our strengths. Supposedly, anyway." Riku found himself giving a weak, crooked grin. "If you're looking for first-hand experience, you're asking the wrong guy."

Sora blinked at him, then gave a quick, sharp laugh. "That's actually kind of reassuring. At least we're in this together."

"Yeah," Riku replied, his throat tight. _That's the point. In it together, at each other's backs, for the rest of our lives._ "When I said permanent, I meant it. You get that, right? There'll be no undoing it if you wake up tomorrow and decide you made a mistake."

"Yeah, I'm getting that," Sora said with a crooked grin that matched Riku's. "I can already kind of feel-- well, _you_ , I guess." He lifted a hand and tapped a finger against his temple. "Just enough that I can't ignore it. So, come on; what do we have to do?"

With a sense of inevitability, Riku gestured Sora closer and sat up with a muffled groan, feeling the pull of tired, stiff muscles. "Sit across from me." Riku waited until Sora had settled down, mimicking Riku's own cross-legged pose, and then he called up his blade. 

_Good thing my left arm's already out of commission,_ he thought wryly, and then brought his blade to bear, cutting a shallow but messy slice in the meat of his palm. He hissed at the sting of it, while Sora made a wordless sound of protest and an instinctive little jerk forward.

He turned the blade awkwardly, one-handed, extending the hilt. "Your turn."

Sora grimaced, eyes darting to the red dripping from Riku's fingers, but he took the blade and didn't hesitate once it was touching his skin. Riku let the blade vanish when Sora was done, and reached out to thread their fingers together.

"The blood is symbolic, mostly," he said quietly, "but it's also a means of connection, heart to heart. It doesn't create the bond, but it helps."

Sora opened his mouth as if to speak, but Riku shook his head, letting his eyes drift shut. "You don't have to say anything, you don't really have to do anything. Just focus on that little bit of me in your head, and let it happen. Try to _want_ it to happen. All right?"

Riku took his own advice and fell silent, turning his attention inward to that warm little knot of _Sora_ that had been nagging at him like a splinter since they'd left the Kingdom. He took a slow breath and tried to will that sense to grow, tried to focus on thoughts of acceptance and willingness to be bound.

Not the easiest thing, given how long he'd been trying to convince himself of exactly the opposite. But Sora was right; they did work well together. Riku was tired of fighting it-- fighting and losing, obviously. And he was _lonely_ , damn it, having been without a partner for so long while everyone he'd grown up with had happily paired off. He wasn't sure his people were meant to be alone.

For a long time, nothing happened. Riku heard Sora shift restlessly, and had to work hard to keep himself from following suit. It wasn't easy, with his palm stinging and his shoulder aching and the heavy weight of exhaustion still hanging over him, but he managed to cling to patience somehow. There were no rules for this-- Zack had once cheerfully told him that you just had to keep fumbling at it until it worked. He'd then gone on to tell a story about someone who, years before, had locked themselves up with their partner for a week before they got it right. Riku rather desperately hoped it wouldn't take that long for them, and not only because they'd be overrun by heartless before they finished.

When it finally happened, it wasn't anything like Riku expected. He had been half-braced for some great rush of feeling, or disorientation or double-vision, maybe. Something big and momentous and life-changing. Instead it was more like something that had already been in him just-- settling into place. Comfortable, easy, and right. It was a completeness, something made right that had been wrong without him knowing it. 

Riku opened his eyes, and knew as he did so that Sora was opening his own at the same time. For a moment they just stared at each other. Then Riku started grinning-- or Sora did, it really didn't matter-- and then they were falling forward onto each other's shoulders for support, laughing helplessly for no good reason.

When they subsided at last, Riku was leaning back against the tree again, with Sora's face tucked against his shoulder. Lingering laughter sent tremors across Sora's back, made his breath puff warmly against Riku's neck. Riku shivered as well, for an entirely different reason, all laughter stalled as Sora shifted and sighed right against his throat.

Habit made Riku try to squash that little thread of attraction, but it was impossible to completely hide it when he had the object of said attraction now living inside his head. He was mostly expecting it when Sora went still, that warm breath stopping momentarily. He _wasn't_ expecting to suddenly feel an embarrassed surge of return attraction, tinged all over with the feeling of _Sora_.

He probably should have been expecting the way Sora's emotions and his got all tangled up for a moment, feeding on each other, leaving Riku with the urgent need to adjust his trousers. But unfamiliar as the entire situation was, that one managed to take him completely off guard.

"Um," Sora's voice murmured after a moment. He sounded-- hesitant, certainly, but there was still some of that giddy excitement lurking beneath the surface. A kind of tension that his emotions in Riku's head left completely unmistakeable. "So, when you said that this Recognition thing sometimes got confused with marriage--"

"Most pairs usually end up sleeping together, yes," Riku made himself answer. "Not always, but-- a lot of them do."

"Right, I suppose having someone else in your head is kind of-- intimate," Sora said faintly.

"Right."

Sora shifted in place, just enough that he was half kneeling over Riku, enough that his cheek dragged across Riku's jaw. Riku sucked in a shuddery breath, then gave in and went for Sora's belt.

Sora gave a little moan of mingled relief and want that went straight to Riku's gut, before moving the last few inches and fastening his mouth to Riku's. Sora's kiss was all teeth and enthusiasm and not much skill, a challenge that Riku gladly answered.

Riku wormed his hand inside Sora's trousers; it was only moments until Sora was returning the favour. Mere moments again when Sora broke away from the kiss with a voiceless gasp, shuddering and jerking in Riku's grasp, but Riku couldn't tease him for that because he really didn't do much better. It wasn't his first time-- that dubious honour went to a boy from a neighbouring camp whose name had been effectively erased by all the wine going around the midsummer fires-- but it might as well have been.

When they caught their breath this time, they were curled on the ground, foreheads just touching. Pre-dawn was just starting to touch the horizon when Riku rolled an eye that way to check.

_We can rest a little longer,_ he thought muzzily, closing his eyes again. _Just a little while._ He reached out a bit of darkness to test and then reinforce his wards, and then he let himself drift back to sleep, lulled by a sense of completion that he had, in some ways, been waiting for his entire life.


	9. Chapter 9

Sora woke up slowly, dragging himself out of vague dreams and wondering why, if he was very obviously sleeping on the cold, hard ground, part of him was convinced that he should feel so damned _good_. Then he opened his eyes and found himself staring at Riku's face from a very short distance away, and all of the reasons came flooding back.

With a huff of effort, he sat up halfway so that he could really look at Riku-- who looked like hell, it had to be said. Not that Sora himself probably looked any better. All of the bloody tears in their clothes, the bruises and the dirty pall of the days of travelling were thrown into merciless clarity by the morning sunlight.

_Wait. Morning?_

The light was far too bright for early morning, and coming from much too high overhead. Which meant they had slept far, far too long. Sora jerked fully upright, jostling Riku; Riku was sitting up too, seconds later, looking around in echoed alarm despite his eyes still being half-lidded. It didn't take Riku long to catch on, just a blink and a narrow look at the sky-- Sora could kind of _feel_ the way his thoughts went from sleep-hazy to sharp and focused-- and then he was muttering a curse and calling his spirit blade to hand.

Sora studied each pool of shadow around their makeshift camp, ready to strike at the barest hint that they were more than just shadows. Eventually, though, when moments ticked by and no ravenous enemy presented itself, his shoulders drooped down. "So," he said slowly, "they didn't follow us?"

Riku's frown deepened as he looked back along their trail-- and then he did something, Sora wasn't sure what it was but it was _something_ , he could feel the surge and ebb of power around Riku even if he didn't know what it was. "Guess not," Riku said then, relaxing slowly. His blade flashed silver-white as it vanished.

"That's-- not entirely out of character, I suppose," Riku went on after a moment, stretching and wincing. Sora caught himself rubbing his own shoulder as a phantom ache leaked over. "Think about how they've treated us so far. They're arrogant. They've warned us off, and toyed with us, but haven't actually killed us despite having multiple chances to do it."

"So, overconfident. Or incompetent," Sora said with a grin. "Maybe both. We can hope, right?"

Riku grinned back, and Sora could feel the warm surge of humour that accompanied it. He could _feel Riku in his head_ , in a distant, comfortable way, and had been doing so since he'd awakened, and that reminder was enough to leave him momentarily breathless. All of that stuff the night before, that had _actually happened_. It hardly seemed possible, but it was impossible to deny that he felt the renewed stab of Riku's pain as Riku shifted and made to stand and then froze with his good hand creeping towards his shoulder.

"Let me see," Sora said, reaching out.

Riku shook his head and made as if to try again, but his mouth was pinched thin and his face was pale. "We should get moving."

"We're fine for now," Sora insisted. "Honestly, if they were going to have followed us, they would have caught us already. So let me make sure you're not going to keel over after walking for ten minutes, okay?" He swatted Riku's hand away before gingerly peeled off the makeshift bandages from the night before, trickling water on them where they had stuck. Even with as much care as he could take, he still ended up pulling apart the newly formed scabs in a few places, making Riku clench his fists and breathe heavily through his teeth.

It wasn't as bad as Sora had feared, seeing it in the light of day-- the edges of the wound looked almost burned, while the center was a mess of bloody tissue, but for an arrow wound it was surprisingly shallow. It would leave a spectacular scar, but probably wouldn't leave much other permanent damage once it healed.

By the time Sora had finished cleaning and redressing the wound, Riku looked a little green around the edges, but when he tested the arm he nodded in appreciation. "That's better. Thanks." Riku turned in place. "What about you?"

Sora shifted, testing. There was the cut on his palm, which was only a minor annoyance-- he wondered if it would scar; almost hoped it would, to serve as a reminder. A thoughtful flex revealed three shallow cuts on his calf-- perfectly spaced, claw marks-- that he had somehow completely ignored in the midst of everything else. But other than the array of scrapes, scratches and other minor wounds, it seemed he had somehow managed to escape their latest encounter mostly unharmed.

When he told Riku as much, for a moment it looked like Riku wouldn't believe him-- his eyes went narrow and scanned over Sora as if searching for some hidden wound. Sora rolled his eyes, and Riku eventually huffed and nodded.

Packing up their camp wasn't that much of a chore, considering that they hadn't really set one in the first place. Cleaning themselves up was the harder part; Riku's shirt and jacket were all but ruined, and both of their trousers were-- uncomfortable, after the night before. Between them, they managed to cobble together a functional and at least halfway-clean change of clothes for each of them, but it took some creativity. The ruined items were unceremoniously buried; Sora couldn't say he was sad to see them go.

It wasn't until Sora had settled his pack and started to pull his gloves back on that he caught sight of his wedding ring, and winced as he abruptly wasn't able to avoid thinking about that aspect of things any more. He-- wasn't sure how that was going to work, honestly. He'd tried to put on a good face the night before, for Riku's sake if nothing else, but he really didn't know how Kairi would react, or the King or his Riders or _anyone_. There was a good chance that Kairi's family, at least, would be angry, even if Kairi herself--

_Even if Kairi, what? What do you really think is going to happen, here?_

Sora worried absently at a loose seam on one glove while his mind turned the issue over and over. Sure, it wasn't like he or Riku had been left with a choice about the whole thing, it wasn't a deliberate betrayal on either of their parts. Having this-- _thing_ with Riku didn't change the way Sora felt about Kairi. But none of that sounded any less like an excuse now than it did the last time he'd thought it. Sora might like to imagine that she'd accept the situation with good grace and humour, but she'd be well within her rights to divorce him on the spot and never speak to either of them again.

Sighing soundlessly, Sora shook his head and tried to put it out of his mind again, at least for the time being. What was done was done, they'd face the music when they saw Kairi again, and just-- go from there. However it worked out. Before they could do that, though, they had to stay alive long enough to get to the border. 

_Survival and national security first_ , Sora reminded himself, _interpersonal problems later._

Riku was studying their backtrail, his eyes narrow and his thoughts a quick and furious hum against the back of Sora's mind. "You see something?" Sora asked.

"Just-- being suspicious," Riku answered with a lopsided shrug. "I can't help but wonder if the heartless got ahead of us somehow. Went around us during the night."

"Without ripping our hearts out on the way?" Sora said, skeptically.

"I know. Unlikely." Riku took a deep breath then and-- did that _something_ again, standing perfectly still as his eyes went vague and Sora's new sense of him started humming like mad. 

When Riku seemed to come back to himself, Sora stepped in. "I felt that. What did you do?"

Riku glanced back at him sidelong, looking-- _resigned_ was the only words that came to Sora's mind, though he couldn't imagine why. "I have a strong elemental affinity," Riku answered slowly, still not meeting Sora's eyes directly. "I can use it to kind of scout ahead a little, see if there are any heartless waiting."

Sora blinked, considering that. "Awesome, that's got to be handy." But Riku wasn't relaxing. Nothing about the situation was making sense, unless-- "What element?"

Riku looked like he wasn't going to answer, but eventually made a face at himself and did. "Darkness."

A hundred thoughts went through Sora's head all at once and were just as quickly gone, chased away by the memory of King Mickey's voice. "Okay," was all he said aloud, nodding, and as the next moment stretched out he got to see Riku slowly relax, see the tense waiting fade away into a puzzled kind of relief.

"I hope you don't take this the wrong way," Riku said carefully, "but that's not the response I expected to get from someone from the Kingdom."

He looked, Sora realized suddenly, like someone who was waiting to be punched and didn't know why it hadn't happened yet. And that was just _not on_. "Yeah, we're working on that," Sora said earnestly. "Don't really know where that prejudice came from, since the King has certainly never had it; maybe it's just a side-effect of the King himself being so strongly associated with light. I thought like that myself, once," he admitted, looking right at Riku, "but Mickey set me straight. The King says that darkness and light are just two sides of the same, they need each other to balance-- it's like anything, right, it's how you use it that matters."

_Believe me,_ he tried to say with his feelings. _This doesn't change anything._

Riku blinked, visibly taken aback. "Your king sounds like a smart guy," he said faintly.

Sora beamed. "Yeah, he's awesome. You'll like him, I think. So, you can tell where the heartless are?" he prompted, when it seemed that Riku's surprise would just keep on going.

"If they're close, and if I'm looking for them," Riku answered after a beat. "I can't sense all the way back to that camp yesterday, but I can tell that we're not about to be jumped in the immediate future. I can use it to set wards around a camp, too," he offered hesitantly. "Like last night. Useful as an early warning system."

Sora snapped his fingers. "I thought I felt something last night."

"I've been trying not to use the darkness very much, though," Riku continued. "I just have this feeling that maybe they can sense it when I do. Not that I suppose it matters right now-- they've got to know where we are, if they wanted to find us they would, with or without me. What do you think?"

Sora chewed as his lip thoughtfully, shifting his shoulder once more to settle his pack-- so much lighter now than when they'd set out. "I don't like the idea of attracting attention, but like you said, it's probably already attracted. And with just the two of us out here, I think we'd be better off using any advantage we've got."

Riku nodded once, and Sora's senses tingled once more, a strong wave at first followed by a continuous, low-level hum. "Probably isn't practical anymore to set watches at night, anyway," Riku said. "We're going to have to push hard from here on out, and we'll hold up better if we're not just sleeping half-nights each." He shifted his own pack gingerly, adjusting the straps so it was more stable in its jury-rigged one-shoulder configuration. "All right, then. Ready?"

"Yep. Eyes peeled, weapons up, feet-- well, sore but functional. Border, here we come." Taking a deep breath, Sora eyed the ground ahead and started walking, trusting Riku to watch their backtrail.

They pushed themselves onward as fast as they could, feeling the lost hours from that morning, but even on the relatively even terrain of the plains they tired out quickly, still suffering from the effects of their earlier fight and all the days before it. They were both grey with exhaustion again by the time it was starting to get dark and they hunted out a good place to stop.

Although Sora apparently wasn't _quite_ so exhausted that settling in at Riku's shoulder and feeling Riku's warmth, feeling him shift as he ate, didn't stir up a very predictable interest. Sora's eyes slid from Riku's long fingers, up his arm, and fixed on Riku's lips briefly before going further up to find Riku looking right back at him, rueful humour written all over his face.

"I'd say 'penny for your thoughts', but--"

Sora blinked. "What?" Riku was just _right there_ , he'd already taken off his vest, Sora could see the faint beat of the pulse in his throat and suddenly could think of nothing other than biting it.

Riku cleared his throat, bringing Sora out of his thoughts-- shared thoughts, he realized ruefully. "Oh, right. Sorry."

They'd started leaning into other at some point. He could smell Riku-- hell, he could probably smell himself if he tried, they hadn't been able to wash in days, but how on earth did Riku still manage to smell _good_?

Riku licked his lips, and Sora's eyes were transfixed; he chuckled, low and warm, and Sora shivered. "You want to--"

" _Yes_ ," Sora answered, and lunged.

This time, at least, they thankfully remembered to push their clothes out of the way first-- constant travel and fighting was hard on clothing, and they had nothing left to change into this time if they were careless. Sora was left muffling deep, sobbing breaths into Riku's shirt where it was bunched up around his chest, while Riku's hand worked in the opened fly of his trousers; Riku himself barely managed to shift about in time to come on Sora's arm and the ground, rather than Sora's still-clothed thigh, when Sora returned the favour a few moments later.

They cleaned up as much as possible, after, pulling themselves back into order while also maintaining contact as much as possible by some unspoken agreement. Sora ended up lying curled under his blanket with his head on Riku's thigh and one of Riku's hands settled at the back of his head. Sora would bet good munny that Riku wasn't fully aware of how his thumb was stroking back and forth against Sora's skin.

"I can't wait for you to meet Mickey," Sora said muzzily. "He's really great. He's kind of my best friend, if that's not too weird-- I mean, he's the Ageless King, of course it sounds a little weird, but I've known him what feels like my entire life so I think it's allowed."

Riku's thumb had gone still right when Sora started talking, but it started up again shortly after; Sora took that as a sign to continue. "My father was a Rider," he explained. "Killed in the line of duty when I was little. My mother died even before that. So Mickey took me in. I was raised at Disney Castle; Mickey was just kind of-- always there, and he never brushed me off just because I was a kid and basically nobody worth noticing."

Mind wandering, Sora kept talking-- his memories of growing up, more about the King, anything that he thought Riku might be interested in. They'd need to learn more about each other, after all; despite everything they'd been through, everything that had happened, they didn't really know each other at all yet. Childhood stories were as good a place to start as any, even if it did mean confessing that one time he'd broken into Yen Sid's library and accidentally turned Goofy into a turtle.

Sora had to stop eventually and lick his lips, mouth getting dry-- and in that pause, Riku cleared his throat, sounding hesitant at first. "I'd say Zack is my best friend. We grew up together. He met Cloud when we were all still kids, though. Young enough that when they started spending every available minute together, I of course became horribly, _horribly_ jealous. I didn't really understand it at that point. I think I stopped speaking to Zack for a while." Riku laughed lightly, hardly more than a huff of breath. "You can imagine how well he took that. I kept coming up with more and more elaborate schemes to avoid him, and he kept coming up with more and more elaborate plans for following me and getting me to talk, and poor Cloud was completely lost more than half the time. I'm glad our parents eventually intervened, I don't know what would have happened otherwise."

Sora's shoulders shook with silent laughter, his smile slowly going relaxed at the corners. He drifted off to sleep at last with Riku's smooth, low murmur filling his ears.


	10. Chapter 10

Their new routine established itself quickly: Sora usually woke first, edgy out in the open despite knowing Riku's wards were set, leaving him to watch the sun rise with Riku's arm slung heavily across his waist. They broke camp quickly and travelled as far and fast as they could during the day. When it started getting dark, they found somewhere sheltered to stop, ate quickly, then stuck their hands down each other's pants while doing their best to suck the breath out of each other's lungs. After, they talked until one of them-- usually Sora-- fell asleep, and the cycle started all over again.

It occurred to Sora just before dawn on the fifth day that he'd never seen Riku completely without his clothes on. He could describe exactly what Riku's face looked like when he came, could remember what his _teeth_ felt like under a probing tongue, but he couldn't picture him naked, how messed up was that.

That line of thinking of course made him imagine taking his own clothes off in front of Riku, which made him blush for some reason. It was just-- shoving your hand down someone's pants in the heat of the moment was one thing, it just happened and he didn't have to stop to think. It seemed like an entirely different thing to deliberately set yourself up for sex, to take off your clothes or-- or take off someone _else's_ \--

Sora took a deep breath, stared at the horizon, and tried to stop thinking about it

Later that day, they finally came upon signs of their own party's backtrail: just a few vague scuff marks in the dirt, a bent branch, a patch of flattened grass, but Riku's eyes lit up as he carefully catalogued each mark. "Six or seven days old," he murmured, squinting ahead like he could track the path just like that. "Either we're moving faster than I thought, or they got held up by something."

"Little bit of both?" Sora said, shrugging.

Riku grinned. "Probably. I--"

Riku's voice cut off suddenly, and he stiffened in place, whipping around and pulling his blade out of the air. Training and instinct had Sora drawing his own sword and stepping in to Riku's back before he managed to even ask what was going on.

"Heartless. Lots of them, close, coming in fast." Riku looked around quickly. "We can have high ground by those rocks."

"Looks good," Sora agreed. They moved up and took defensive position just before the first black shape came bubbling up out of the ground.

They fought back to back to start, Sora fully appreciating the bond between them for perhaps the first time as he just _knew_ where Riku was, what he was doing the entire time. He had never moved so smoothly with anyone in battle before, feeling like they each were a natural extension of the other. It was-- kind of fun, really, or it would have been if they weren't fighting to keep their hearts in their chests. He couldn't wait until all of this was over and they got a chance to spar against each other under better circumstances.

They held their ground well enough for a while, but the enemy numbers were overwhelming, heartless everywhere, turning the ground black all around them, and it eventually drove them apart. Sora staggered as one of the big ones got in close and used sheer bulk to widen the gap between him and Riku. His back felt horribly exposed; he was losing their high ground and being driven down into a nasty-looking puddle of the little ones, this was _not good_ \--

He staggered again as the big one got lucky and clipped him hard on the shoulder. For just a few seconds, his hand went numb-- just long enough to send his sword spinning out of his grasp and out of sight.

Riku was shouting something angry and incoherent, nearby, the bond between them singing with alarm. Sora braced for the blow, instinct making him lift his arms in front of him like he still had his sword, knowing it wouldn't be enough-- except that suddenly there was a blade just _there_ , where he needed it, sliding into his hand like it had been handed to him, like it had been _waiting_. It took the heartless' strike with a bright ringing sound, deflecting the blow so that Sora could duck in and finish the creature off.

Not willing to question his good fortune-- or able, at that moment, with so many more heartless still to go-- Sora just took a deep breath and dove forward, aiming for where Riku's voice was still sounding. He cut down a pair of heartless that had been angling for Riku's back, falling in again at Riku's shoulder, and tried not to go weak in the knees at the sense of relief that was flooding through both of them.

It seemed like an age before the last of the heartless melted away. Sora stumbled into Riku's shoulder, making them both stagger before they adjusted their balance, leaning heavily on each other. "We clear?" Sora asked.

Riku's lips twisted. "For now. There are more out there, but for some reason they're keeping their distance."

Sora nodded, let out a slow breath as he tried to relax, shaking out his shoulders. "I'll take the breathing room, whatever the reason for it."

Once he felt a little more steady, Sora held up his new sword for a better look. He heard Riku's startled draw of breath almost immediately.

"That's a spirit blade."

"Yeah," Sora said, "that's kind of what I figured, too." He turned it into the light, watching how it gleamed with the same faint sheen that all of the spirit blades shared, almost like an oil slick on the surface but not quite. It was very similar to his own sword in shape and balance, at least, though the hilt and guards had darker lines and shapes to them that reminded Sora of Riku's blade. The blade itself was wider than his old one, maybe a bit longer too, though it certainly didn't feel like it to hold it. "I take it this wasn't supposed to happen?"

Riku shrugged helplessly. "It's pretty typical for someone's blade to change once they Recognize, so that it takes on some aspects of their partner's." He held up his own, tapping at the hilt, and Sora finally noticed the new silvery-bright streak that was shot through the center of the blade, culminating in a swooping piece near the handle that reminded Sora of a wing. "But I've never heard of one just-- of course, I've never heard of anyone Recognizing a King's Rider, either," he interrupted himself. "So I suppose anything's possible. You sure your ancestors didn't wander out of the Kingdom's borders at some point? Maybe partake in a midsummer festival or two?"

Sora echoed Riku's shrug. "Pretty sure?" he answered. He chuckled, a little giddy following battle, and Riku snorted, and they ended up standing there laughing helplessly at each other for a while.

Reality reasserted itself when they had caught their breath, though, and Sora was left with a sword in his hand and no sheath that would fit it. Riku had long since banished his to wherever it was he kept the thing. "So what do I do, do I just hang on to it? How do I get it to go away and come back like yours does?"

Riku frowned. "You just-- do it."

"Oh, thanks. Very helpful."

"I wasn't ever really taught _how_ , okay, it just sort of happened," Riku shot back, rolling his eyes. "Don't think about it too much. You don't think about breathing, do you? The blade is a part of you, it's kind of the same thing."

"Easy for you to say," Sora muttered, but he frowned down at his blade and then deliberately looked away. He wasn't sure whether to try and forget the thing was there, or think _at_ it that he didn't need it anymore-- just in case, he tried both, with no result. Frustrated, Sora threw the thing away from him, and it vanished in mid-air a few paces away. 

He had a split second to rejoice in his victory before the hilt reappeared in his hand, making him yelp in surprise. He tried his best to ignore Riku's resulting laughter, only partially muffled by his hand.

As a last-ditch effort, he took the blade and moved as if to sheathe it, like he would his own sword. The motion was familiar to him, and it was something that all of his training and experience would interpret to mean _done fighting now, all clear_. With any luck--

The strange new sword vanished from his grip, and this time didn't reappear. Sora shifted, feeling vaguely like he was actually wearing a sword, a phantom weight at his hip; he mimed drawing it and it settled back into his hand easily in a faint swirl of light. "Ha! Got it."

"Congratulations," Riku said dryly.

Sora hesitated briefly over the empty sheath hanging from his belt, and thought about going to fetch his old blade from wherever it had ended up. But he was leery of hanging around poking through the grass for it when there were a few too many shadows out there that looked maybe a little too dark to be normal. So he unhooked the sheath instead and let it drop, feeling a momentary pang of vulnerability at the loss; the idea of being unarmed out here made his skin crawl, even if he knew that he really wasn't.

Riku stiffened in place, just a bit, then bit back a groan. "Here they come again." He looked around them, head moving back and forth though his eyes didn't completely follow the motion. "It's open ahead," Riku said thoughtfully. "Really, really open."

Sora looked at the faint trail they had been following, feeling somehow completely unsurprised. "Trap?" he asked flatly.

"Most likely."

"Are we any better off staying here?"

"Doubt it."

"Right then." He arched an eyebrow at Riku, who gave him a stately nod before leading the way.

_Running again,_ Sora thought faintly as they went, feet tearing through the short grass. They were moving as desperately as they had in the foothills, cutting what Sora hoped was a straight path towards the border, expecting at any moment for heartless to come at them from all sides.

When they did, forming a wave cresting behind them, driving them before it, Sora didn't even have to think about drawing his new blade before it was in his hand.

Sora didn't know how long they'd been fighting, this time, before a very familiar spell went arching over the field, exploding in a shower of icy frost. Sora's head whipped towards it, his eyes gone wide. _Donald?_

He couldn't quite see clearly, there was too much going on, but it looked like-- like someone else was fighting on their flank, cutting into the ring of heartless surrounding them. There were human voices shouting, voices that sounded familiar. When Sora glanced at Riku he saw the same dawning hope on his face that Sora himself was feeling. Reinforcements. Help on the way. If they could just hold on--

As if sensing that their advantage was fading, the heartless surged in closer, harder, reaching out with grasping claws and climbing over each other to leap at their human prey. Sora had just enough time to see Riku go down hard from a knock to the head, before there were heartless swarming all over him, pulling him down, and everything went black.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, folks. I didn't intend for that cliffhanger to be quite so...cliffhangery, but part of this chapter just refused to be written.
> 
> It will likely be slow going, because I am in the midst of the worst writer's block I have ever experienced, but I am determined to finish this fic.

Riku woke with his heart beating a frantic double-time in his chest, and he came up in a lunge that didn't account for the bandages wrapped around his torso and one arm. The pain caught up with him almost immediately, made him collapse backwards with his breath seized up in his chest and sparks dancing across his vision. There was something in him, though-- something urgent, panicked, something that said _move now before it's too late_ \-- that made him keep struggling upwards.

There were hands on his shoulders, pushing him down. "Easy there, kiddo. If you reopen any of those, I think the nice medic is going to have your head."

_Zack_ , the something in him recognized, and let go. Riku sagged, and blinked his eyes clear to find both Zack and Cloud hovering over him, arms held out like they were thinking of grabbing him again. Behind them, Riku could just make out the close, tarp walls of a tent; he'd been laid out on a piled-up mat of blankets, with a few nearby baskets holding bandages and other accoutrements of the healer's trade.

"In addition to the lovely array of injuries you seem to have collected in our absence, you've now got a few nasty gashes on your arms and chest, a knot on your forehead the size of my fist, and a seriously strained shoulder," Zack said when Riku's attention returned his way. "The medic swears you'll heal up good as new, though. Maybe even better than, if I'm to believe everything I hear about the Kingdom's latest flavour of potion."

"He's asked for the recipe three times already," Cloud murmured. Riku managed a weak chuckle in response.

He cleared his throat tentatively, drawing in a shallow breath. "What happened?" he rasped. "I don't remember very clearly." He couldn't recall anything about how he had been injured this last time, actually, which bothered him. There was something there that he _should_ remember, something important. He just couldn't see it past the haze in his head.

"Well, you two were doing your best to hold off an entire army, from what I could see. Luckily, the rest of us made excellent time to the border and were already on our way back to--"

_You two_ , Riku heard, and just like that it all came back. "Shit," he blurted, eyes going wide. " _Sora_."

"Hey, no, Riku," Zack said, sounding alarmed, and he was-- he was holding Riku down again, he and Cloud, because Riku himself was apparently struggling to get up even though he didn't remember consciously deciding to do so. He couldn't quite make himself stop, either, no matter how much it hurt, not until his abused muscles gave out entirely. 

He subsided into his friends' grip, panting weakly, eyes watering hard enough to spill over. He was only distantly aware of someone else coming pushing through the tent's door flap, shuffling in close to lay a cool hand on his forehead. A brief, murmured conversation was held over his head, and then there was more shuffling as Zack and Cloud slowly withdrew. Still struggling to regain control of his own breathing, it took Riku a few minutes to look up and see who the newcomer was.

Kairi was dressed in worn leather and linen, with a pair of knives strapped to her thighs. The brace around her shoulders was meant to hold a quiver of arrows, and her hair was bound back securely. It was a familiar and welcome sight for Riku, though it might have been a shock for some of Kairi's peers at court; she was beautiful in her fancy dresses, too, but like this she was more like one of his people than a lady of the Kingdom. It was a big part of what had drawn Riku to her in the first place.

"Riku," she said, and Riku closed his eyes on a long sigh.

"Sora?" he asked.

"He was taken, we think. There was no body, anyway, where we found you." The tremor in her voice was almost imperceptible. He wondered if she knew, as he did, that the heartless didn't leave a body to find when they were done.

Half-terrified of what he would find, Riku took a few deep breaths in an attempt to focus himself and then reached out for the sense of _Sora_ that had already become so familiar. He would _know_ if Sora was dead, surely there wouldn't be any mistaking the absence of Sora's heart linked to his own.

For a moment, Riku couldn't find it, and his throat closed up tight-- but when he swallowed back the panic and tried again, tried _harder_ , he caught on the edge of that familiar presence. It felt thin and uncertain and very far away, but it was there. Sora was still out there, somewhere.

"I-- we have to--" _Go after him, find him, bring him back,_ he started to say, then stopped as the full magnitude of where he was and who he was talking to sank in. Because really, how was he supposed to explain to his own long-time love and Sora's _wife_ exactly why he had to get Sora back? Maybe sometime when his head wasn't pounding and his thoughts didn't feel full of wool he would have been able to find the right words, but at that moment he figured he'd be lucky to make a complete sentence.

Kairi gave him a puzzled look that morphed slowly into a frown-- the kind of frown that usually had Riku telling her whatever she wanted to know despite any intentions he might have had to the contrary. He winced. "Later," he muttered. "Please?"

She looked at him narrowly, her lips pursed, but eventually nodded. "Later," she said, and he wasn't sure if was agreement or a threat.

It wasn't long before his eyes drifted closed, lulled by the warmth of Kairi's hand around his own and the sound of her voice as she told him-- something important, probably, he should have been paying more attention. But the words all jumbled together in his ears and he was far too quickly asleep again.

He felt much better when he woke again. Physically, at least-- the pain of his injuries was nearly gone, though the bandages were still wrapped snugly in place. That lack made the gnawing ache of Sora's absence all the worse, though, impossible to ignore now that there were no distractions to draw his attention away. 

He was alone, to start, but as soon as he made to sit up a strange woman-- the medic, presumably-- immediately pushed inside the tent and started his way. "Good," she said. "I was hoping you'd be awake by now. If you've healed enough, there's a pair of guards waiting outside to escort you off. Someone somewhere is obviously waiting rather anxiously for your report."

After a quick but brutally thorough examination-- like medics everywhere, the woman was merciless in making sure her patient wasn't hiding anything-- Riku was cleared to be upright. He dressed gingerly in the blissfully clean clothes that were provided to him, favouring his shoulder instinctively; even though the wounds were healed, he still _remembered_ them there. He'd always had the same reaction to potions, his mind telling him one thing while his body was convinced of something else.

Outside the tent, Riku got his first real look at a Kingdom border fortress living up to its intended purpose. The imposing stone walls that ringed the sea of tents and wagons and people had obviously seen better days, but it would still take a lot of effort to get over or through them.

There was indeed a pair of guards waiting for him, dressed for the field with their lord's colours tied around their arms. When Riku first emerged blinking from his tent, they were leaning against a pile of crates looking bored, but they quickly perked up once they saw him. Riku didn't even try to argue when they herded him towards the inner tower of the fortress, where the heavy, draped banners proclaimed the presence of someone important in the Kingdom's army. Fairly minor lords, Riku figured, eyeing the colours and sigils on display-- he wasn't Kairi, who could list off the heraldry of every noble house without blinking, but he knew how to recognize most of the major players in the Kingdom, and none of those were present.

At the very center of the display, the King's banner was a plain yellow crown on blue, not the more elaborate crest that would signify his presence in the fort. Still, the fact that the banner was hung at all gave Riku momentary pause-- somewhere along the border, the Ageless King himself had taken the field.

Riku's escort dropped him in front of a long table ringed by people who fixed him with intense stares and made him go over and over everything that he and Sora had seen in the wilds, picked apart every fact, every observation. He talked himself hoarse while they shuffled maps and made notes and murmured to each other. And then he talked some more when they somehow found even more questions to ask.

Eventually they seemed satisfied; some invisible signal had Riku's escort appearing again from the doorway, while the army's leaders closed ranks around their table. Riku cleared his throat before he could be ushered away. "Is there a plan?" he asked baldly.

The guards shifted uncomfortably. A few of the heads around the table turned to give him impatient looks; more of them didn't look at all. Riku held his ground. "If you're intending for my people to be involved in what you're planning, we need to know what's expected of us," he said firmly. "Will we be responsible for any more forays beyond the border? Will there--" His voice broke; he cleared his throat in an attempt to hide it. "Will there be a rescue attempt made for Sora?"

The grim looks and shifty eyes that met his question told him more than he wanted to know, but he made himself wait until he heard the words. "We'll keep you informed if there's any need to go outside the border again," one of them said. "As for Sora-- it's regrettable, but under the circumstances we can't spare anyone for a rescue mission. Not for just one Rider, even if it is him."

"Likely nothing left to rescue, anyway," someone else muttered. Only the fact that he couldn't tell _who_ kept Riku from reacting in a way he would probably have regretted later on. As it was, by the time he was led out of the tower and released into the open air, he had clenched his fists hard and long enough to leave little red crescents on his palms.

They weren't even going to try. After everything Sora had done for them, they were just going to leave him out there to die.

There was a tiny, logical voice in the back of his mind trying to tell him that both he and Sora had known the risks, that in the face of larger problems the fate of one person wasn't going to be a military priority. That the Kingdom's leaders didn't have the Recognition tightening like a vise around their chests the way Riku did, telling them that Sora was still alive. But Riku wasn't much interested in _logic_ just then. The idea of sitting there and leaving Sora to his fate made his skin crawl, made him want to run right back out into the middle of the heartless army and take them all on single-handedly. The only thing holding him back at that moment was the certain knowledge that it wouldn't work. 

Riku grimaced. He needed a plan. Which meant that he needed to be able to _think_ , which wasn't happening with his head and his heart chasing each other dizzy. 

His shoulder was still aching. That was as good a place as any to start.

Luckily for Riku, he was in a military camp. It didn't take him long to find a small weapons practice area with a stand of wood and straw targets-- one of the many that were scattered between the tents and along the walls. There were a couple of soldiers to one side of it, muttering over a sword with their heads close together, but Riku ignored them in favour of settling himself in front of one of the straw dummies. No better way to throw off the after-effects of the potion and make his body realize that it was, in fact, healed, than to simply use it. With any luck, the workout would also burn off some of the restless, aimless buzz in his thoughts.

Grimly determined, Riku summoned his blade and went to work.

Deep in concentration over a sequence of moves, Riku only subconsciously acknowledged the familiar voice making a shocked sound behind him-- just enough so that when a hand grabbed his shoulder and whirled him around he registered _friend_ instead of _foe_ and didn't instinctively lash out. The sudden breaking of his focus did leave him dazed, though, standing there like the dummy he'd been hitting while Zack pulled his arm up and got a good, long eyeful of the blade in Riku's hand.

By the time Riku pulled himself together enough to understand what was happening, Zack was already grinning, looking far too delighted as he lifted his eyes to Riku's face. "Someone obviously had more of an adventure than I thought. Is our little Riku actually _Recognized_? After all this time?"

Riku's first instinct was to deny it-- sheer stupidity, because there was Sora's influence wrapped all around his blade, impossible to hide from those who understood what it meant. His next instinct, to spill everything in the face of his friend's expectant look and honest happiness, stuck in his throat as he remembered that there was someone else who deserved to be told first.

"Later," he said, banishing his blade and shaking his arm loose of Zack's grip. "I'll-- just, later, okay?"

He moved off before Zack could press the issue-- okay, fine, he _ran away_ , he could admit it-- and went looking for Kairi.

He found her talking to someone with an air of smug authority and the odour of horses hanging about him in equal measure. She gave Riku a distracted smile as he approached, but the low murmur and the nod-and-smile she had going on with the man never faltered. Riku settled himself nearby, close enough to hear but far enough not to seem like he could, and couldn't help but smirk to himself as he listened to her handle the petty little official like a pro.

The man finally left, puffed up like he'd won some great victory. Riku wondered at what point he'd realize that he hadn't actually got the extra supplies he'd so pompously demanded.

Kairi turned to Riku with a warm smile. "Hey, you. Feeling better?"

"Yeah."

Her smile faded only a little as she eyed him knowingly. "I'm guessing it's time for 'later', then?"

Riku sighed. "Yeah."

He didn't quite dare take her hand, but she followed close behind him anyway as he led them off to as isolated a corner as he could find in the busy camp, tucked up against the wall where tumbled, scattered blocks of stone hadn't left enough room to set up a tent. Leaning against as particularly large block, Kairi waited while Riku cleared his throat awkwardly and took a few false starts before finding his voice.

"I Recognized Sora," he eventually choked out. He couldn't think of any other way to say it, other than to just-- say it.

Her eyes went wide. "Oh," she said quietly.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I _tried_ , it just--"

"Oh, stop that," she said, and his words dried up instantly. "It's not your fault," she continued. "Unless you've all been lying to me all these years, it's not something either of you could have controlled, it just _is_. Right?"

Heart still in his throat, Riku nodded.

"I didn't think Recognition happened outside the clans, though," she said after the silence had stretched for a few endless moments.

"It doesn't. I don't know why. It's just-- Sora," he said helplessly.

She laughed at that, stilted but real. "If anyone could break the rules, I'm not surprised it's him." Her eyes flew wide all of a sudden, and one hand came up to cover her mouth. "Oh no, Riku-- are you all right? With him-- I mean, is he--"

"Alive?" Riku finished flatly. "Yes." Without his permission, one of his hands lifted to rub at his chest; he forced it back down, but not before she noticed. "I have to-- Kairi, they're not sending anyone out after him."

It was gratifying how horrified she looked at those words-- satisfying, to know that he wasn't the only one who thought that they _should_ , that they had to. The horror quickly faded, though-- into sympathy, as she reached out to put a hand on his arm, and a calm sort of determination. 

"I guess it's up to us, then," she said. When Riku gave her a startled blink, she fixed him with a stare and lifted her chin in a way that promised a world of trouble to anyone who tried to stop her. "If you think you're doing this alone, you're an idiot. With you half out of your head worrying about Sora, you're going to need someone to keep you on track, and that's going to be me."

Riku blinked at her again, then broke into a helpless smile, crooked and grateful and completely smitten. "Yes, ma'am."

She smiled back at him, then clapped her hands. "All right. You still look like hell-- don't argue with me, you do, and I know for a fact that you haven't had time to replace all the energy they used in your healing. So you're going to go sleep some more. I'll start getting things organized, and we can finalize our plans once you're able to speak in full sentences again." 

She paused, licked her lips. "I'm-- happy for you, you know," she added, tentatively. When he lifted a questioning eyebrow at her, she gave a little shrug. "Really, I am. Not about the circumstances, of course." She made a little gesture that somehow took in the entire armed camp. "Or the fact that we need to go rescue him from the bad guys. But-- I know how long you've waited to Recognize someone, and I'm glad you finally found them."

"Yeah, but I wanted it to be _you_ , Riku said plaintively. "Or, I don't know, someone completely unrelated, not your-- your _husband_."

"Stop it," she repeated, rolling her eyes. "You don't get to beat yourself up over this, understood?"

For a moment he just blinked at her. "Yes, ma'am," he finally managed.

She gave him an arch look and a sharp nod. "Right, then. You remember that. We _will_ get him back, Riku," she continued, more seriously. "I'm not sure exactly how, yet, but we will. Believe that."

Looking at her, seeing the determination in her eyes, Riku realized that despite all the odds-- he did.

A dizzy sort of exhaustion crept over him as Kairi led him back through the camp again; he vaguely heard her talking about _assigned areas_ and mentioning familiar names, but mostly he was too distracted by the relief that came from being able to let someone else take over for a while to actually get any meaning out of the words. He let himself be led to a tent, at Kairi's direction, and all but fell onto the makeshift bed inside it.

His dreams were frantic, full of darkness and voices and the gnawing empty ache of a heart stretched thin.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More of an aside than a full chapter; Kairi insisted on having her POV known.

Kairi stood over Riku for a few minutes, watching him sleep. He'd dropped off almost before he was fully horizontal, and the deep hollows around his eyes attested his exhaustion. Potions were amazing things, but they were also deceptive. You still burned just as much of your own energy healing from a potion as you did doing things the old-fashioned way, it just happened _faster_ , and that energy took time to replenish. In the case of very bad injuries, Kairi had seen someone do nothing but sleep for days as their body caught up to the potion's work. 

It was worth it, though. Seeing Riku stumbling around grey with exhaustion was better than seeing him covered in blood and bruises, like he had been when they'd brought him back. And some of his current predicament was--

Well. Some of what was wrong with him was just Sora.

Forcing her shoulders to relax, Kairi turned away from the sleeping Riku and stepped outside the tent, where she found Zack and Cloud waiting, tied to Riku just as tightly as they ever were. Their obvious concern was heart-warming; Kairi had always been glad to know that her Riku had such good friends looking out for him. They'd followed her all the way to the tent, not more than a few steps behind. 

Riku hadn't even noticed they were there. It was-- disconcerting, seeing him so out of it when he usually held himself under tight control. Kairi had to wonder if he even realized just how much Sora's absence was affecting him. He'd caught himself that once, rubbing at his chest as if to ease away an ache, but he hadn't seemed to notice all the other times he'd made the exact same gesture while they had been talking.

She looked at Zack and Cloud, all concerned looks and grim frowns like _someone_ was going to be paying for making their friend a wrung-out mess. And in that moment she couldn't help but agree with them.

"Come on, boys," she said to them. "Let's talk. We have a rescue to plan."


	13. Chapter 13

Riku woke to the familiar, rhythmic sound of a whetstone on steel. Kairi was sitting nearby-- _on guard_ , he recognized, and though he wasn't sure exactly what she was guarding against, it still made long-ingrained instincts relax to have someone watching out for him while he slept. Her hands moved smoothly, sharpening one of her knives to a fine, wicked edge.

He cleared his throat. "How long?"

Her eyes darted his way, but she finished wiping down her knife and sheathing it before turning to him fully. "You've been asleep the better part of a day. You needed it," she added sharply, when he instinctively made to protest. "And we've had everything well in hand, so there was nothing better that you could have been doing."

Riku's mouth clicked shut, words unsaid.

Kairi eyed him critically. "You look better," she went on, her voice softer. "I'm glad."

Taking a deep breath, Riku stretched carefully and then nodded. "I feel better," he admitted. And it was true-- he didn't feel stretched quite so thin as he had before he'd slept, and the last of the residual aches from his injuries had faded away to nothing. The ache in his chest was still there, of course, but that wasn't going to go away until they got Sora back.

"So?" he said, trying for a light tone. "Have you managed to recruit a rescue party out from under the army's nose?"

Kairi smiled. "Something like that." She rose and exited the tent, leaving Riku to follow once he finally managed to extricate himself from the blankets.

He caught up with her just outside, where she was surveying the activity buzzing around them. Riku's tent was one of many clustered together around a central firepit; the entire area was currently filled up with people talking quietly, sparring, checking maps and lists, fussing with packs and gear. Among them were the familiar faces of Riku’s own hunting party, which didn’t surprise him, and the Kingdom faces he knew from Sora's Riders-- with Donald and Goofy at the center of them, directing the flow. There were still others that he only vaguely knew from being around Kairi's home in the Heartlands. Luckily, the entire fortress was in enough of a stir that the activity didn’t look out of place, so long as an observer didn’t think too long about the tense air that surrounded this particular group.

Cloud was the first to notice them; he took one look and gave Zack a hard nudge in the side. Zack, of course, squawked and squirmed away, but when he followed Cloud's pointed look he was immediately up and moving. When he was close enough to be heard, his words were directed to Kairi even while his eyes were raking over Riku critically. "Everyone's supplied and packed, we're good to head out at evening watch."

"We've got someone willing to let us out the side gate without it ending up on the official transcripts," Kairi explained to Riku. "At least, not until it's too late."

"Donald's got someone ready to pick up the potions just before we leave," Zack went on, and Riku's eyebrows rose.

"Potions?" he asked. "I didn't think you could travel with those." He'd always been told that the effectiveness of the Kingdom's potions started to decay soon after they were brewed; they were amazing when given fresh, but useless as field gear for long hauls.

"Yeah, they'll be duds after three or four days," Zack confirmed. "But just in case we need them before then, we figured it couldn't hurt." 

In case they found Sora before then, Riku filled in easily. In case he was injured enough that even a weak potion might be enough to make the difference. They weren't taking any chances.

Riku found himself reassured by that.

Zack went back to his report to Kairi, while Cloud edged in on Riku's other side, bumping against his shoulder. "How are you doing?"

Riku managed a shrug. He wasn't sure what to say, really-- he couldn't say that he was _fine_ , even though physically he was as good as he'd ever be. But with the way everything had timed out he hadn't actually told them about Sora yet, so it wasn’t like he could just come out and--

"We'll find him," Cloud said quietly, as if reading his thoughts. Riku blinked at him widely a few times, long enough for Cloud to roll his eyes and give a rather Zack-like smirk. "Come on, you had to know we'd figure it out."

Zack snorted, looking their way. "Yeah, you're not exactly subtle, kid, we did see your blade. And so I asked myself, what's more likely, you ran into someone new out there in the middle of nowhere as you were _running away from the invading army_ , or you were being your usual stupid stubborn self about a certain someone you’d already met and were, in retrospect, being really weird about. Yeah, tough one."

"Also," Cloud said, cutting into Zack's ramble, "Kairi confirmed it for us when we asked."

Zack grinned, unapologetic. "Yeah, that too."

"Right," Riku said weakly. He cleared his throat awkwardly. "So, we get out of the camp, what's the plan after that?"

He was unsurprised when Kairi had an immediate, matter-of-fact response. "You keep pointing us in the right direction. We keep you from walking off any cliffs or into roaming packs of heartless. We find Sora, we kick the butts of whoever's holding him, and then we come home again."

Riku stared at her for a long moment, then turned to stare similarly at his friends who were just nodding along like it was obvious. "Good plan."

"Sometimes the simple ones are best," Goofy's voice entered the conversation from the side. They all turned, making room, and Sora's seconds stepped in to join the circle. "We're all ready to go," Goofy told Kairi. "Now we just gotta wait."

"Are you two-- all of you, that is, are you okay with this?" Riku had to ask. "The guys in charge didn't really forbid anyone from going after Sora, but it was pretty strongly implied. Are you going to get in trouble for this?"

Donald just shrugged. "Nice thing about being a King's Rider, we really only answer to the King," he said. "And Mickey would want Sora back as much as we do."

"Don't think we much care what those guys up in the tower think," Goofy finished firmly.

Riku managed a smile. "Thanks." Then he turned back to his friends-- the ones who were doing this for him, and no other reason-- and his smile softened. "Thanks," he repeated, quieter.

Cloud nudged him again. "If it were Zack, you'd do the same for me."

"Damn right I would," Riku muttered. He rolled his eyes at Zack's beaming face. "We couldn't leave him out there with an army, he'd take them over and then we'd all be doomed."

It was pretty weak as far as insults went, but it still made Zack laugh so Riku figured it was all right after all.


End file.
